NEWS, TECHNOLOGY, CASE STUDY
Discovering the 1858 Lava Flow Field at Somma-Vesuvius (Italy) Through geoitinerary, Virtual Tour and 3D Reconstruction of Volcanic Landforms
Explore the development of a geoitinerary with five stations for the 1858 lava flow field at Somma-Vesuvius, the creation of a website containing a virtual 360° tour, and the digital reconstruction of the largest lava tube using 3D laser scanning.
Geotourism in volcanic areas attracts millions of visitors each year travelling to see and explore volcanic areas. One of the most famous and most visited volcanic areas in the world is Somma-Vesuvius in the Campania region of southern Italy near Naples. It is best known for its explosive eruptions, but has also shown effusive activity with lava flows, for example in 1858.
In this scientific project a multidisciplinary approach including
- integrating fieldwork
- terrestrial laser scanning
- 360° photography
- explicative panels, and
- SWOT analysis
was applied at Vesuvius for the first time.
Thomas Lemaire from the Department of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences (DiSTAR) at the University of Naples Federico II, and his co-authors describe here the development of an accessible and scientifically robust geoitinerary to illustrate effusive volcanic activity within the 1858 lava flow field.
Based on detailed field investigations, five characteristic volcanic landforms were identified and selected: three lava tubes, a tumulus, and a transient vent formed during the 1858 eruption. To support geoscientific communication, explanatory panels were designed to describe the formation and growth mechanisms of these features. In addition, 360° images were acquired and implemented into an openly accessible website, enabling an immersive virtual tour of the study area.
Explore this virtual tour here.
The interior of the largest lava tube was scanned with the RIEGL VZ-400 terrestrial laser scanner, a predecessor of the RIEGL VZ-600i 3D terrestrial laser scanner.
RIEGL VZ-400 main features:
- echo digitization and online waveform analysis
- 3 mm accuracy
- measurement range up to 600 metres
- measurement rate up to 122,000 points per second
- 100 x 360-degree field of view
Nineteen individual scans were taken from different positions to avoid shadow zones due to the complex geometry. Twelve of these 19 scans were used for mesh creation in the RiSCAN Pro software and were the base for the digital reconstruction of the tube.
The full article was published at Springer Nature Link and is available here.
