Introduction to the Special Issue Geoscience in Active Areas

The Special Issue (SI) of Pure and Applied Geophysics titled “Geoscience in Active Areas” has gathered 21 contributions from a wide range of geoscience disciplines, including geophysics, geodesy, geology, seismology, volcanology, oceanography and tectonics giving the opportunity to exchange leading edge ideas on a broad range of topics focused on volcanic and seismically active areas of the Earth. A key achievement of this volume is to communicate that the multidisciplinary approach is the way forward for a holistic understanding of volcanic and seismic phenomena and their tectonic origins. It wants to report on the state of art efforts of geoscience community to mitigate the geohazards in some of the most dangerous territories of the world, where inhabitants and infrastructure are exposed to extreme natural hazards associated with peculiar tectonics and geodynamics of the regions. Most of these hazards relate to continent–continent collisions between Indian and Eurasian Plates, as it is in the Himalaya region or the interaction between Eurasian and Nubia Plates, as for active volcanic areas of Southern Italy, Azores and Canary archipelagos or rapid plate convergence of the Pacific plate, as in the case of Taiwan. This tectonic interplaying has caused significant earthquakes and one of the largest, if not the largest explosive volcanic event in Europe in the past 200,000 years (the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption at Campi Flegrei). This SI has even collected a selection among the most significant investigations presented at the International Workshop on “Geosciences in Active Areas”, organized by the Institute of Geosciences, IGEO (CSIC-UCM) and the House of Volcanoes (Cabildo de Lanzarote) held in Lanzarote in October 2023.