Antonio Stoppani (24 August 1824 –1 January 1891) [1] was an Italian Catholic priest, patriot, geologist and palaeontologist. He studied the geology of the Italian region and wrote a popular treatise, Il Bel Paese (Italian for "the beautiful country"), on geology and natural history. He was among the first to propose a geological epoch dominated by human activities that altered the shape of the land.
Born in Lecco, Stoppani studied theology and became a priest in the order of the Rosminians. He was ordained in 1848, a year of turmoil with the Siege of Milan. During this siege, the Five Days of Milan, he became a hero for his role in the use of hot air balloons to send messages out of the besieged city. Along with Vincenzo Guglielmini, he ensured that the balloons could move over the walls of the city from the Seminario Maggiore di Porta Orientale and carry messages to rally the Italians against the Austrian Empire. [2] He later became professor of geology in the Royal Technical Institute of Milan, and was distinguished for his research on the Triassic and Liassic formations of northern Italy. [1]
Stoppani was important as a popularizer of science. His most popular work, Il Bel Paese, conversazioni sulle bellezze naturali la geologia e la geologia e la geografia fisica d'Italia (1876) ("The Beautiful country, conversation on the natural beauty of geology and the physical geography of Italy"), after which Bel Paese cheese was named by Egidio Galbani (the wrapper for the cheese included a portrait of Stoppani [3] ). It presents, by means of 32 didactic, scientific conversations supposedly in front of a fireplace, ideas and concepts from the natural sciences, in language accessible to the average 19th-century reader. It was so popular that it went into 120 editions by 1920 and was a textbook in schools. It deals especially with geological curiosities and the beauty of the Italian landscape. He commented on Italians who "know almost nothing about the natural beauty of our country; yet take delight when someone calls it a garden" and that the English fall in love with just one thing and devote their energies, emotions, and life to arrive dead or alive at the summit of mountains. His introduction to natural history declared that "man should never disappear from nature, nor should nature disappear from man". [4] [5] Stoppani, like many other clergyman naturalists of the period, was a supporter of the concordismo, a school of thought that sought to find concordance between the teachings of the bible and evidence from geology. He promoted the idea that Catholics needed to learn science and that the bible was to be interpreted rather than taken literally. [6] He was also an important figure in "Catholic Alpinism", a movement that sought to use mountains to tell God's glory. [7] Stoppani was however a critic of the ideas of evolution that Darwin's publication had brought into Europe. [8]
Stoppani's works on palaeontology and geology include:
In this last work the author discussed the glaciation of the Italian Alps and the history of Italy during the Pleistocene age. [1] Stoppani described several species of fossil molluscs while other fossil species have been named in his honour, including Fedaiella stoppanii Marini 1896 (a snail), Placochelyanus stoppanii Oswald 1930, Lymnaea stoppanianus Coppi, 1876 and Gyraulus (Gyraulus) stoppanii (Sacco, 1886). [11] Most of his collections are in the Museo di Storia Naturale, Milano , the building of which he was responsible for constructing as director from 1882 to 1891. [12] Stoppani Glacier in Tierra del Fuego is named after him.
Stoppani was the great-uncle of Maria Montessori, famous for her work on education; [13] he was the uncle of Maria's mother Renilde. [14] The Italian painter Giovanni Battista Todeschini (1857–1938) was his nephew. An oil painting of Stoppani made by Todeschini is held in the Public Museum at Lecco. [15]
In 1873 Stoppani acknowledged the increasing power and impact of humanity on the Earth's systems and referred to the anthropozoic era [16] an idea that was possibly based on George Perkins Marsh who lived in Italy [17] and whose work, Man and Nature, was translated into Italian in 1872. In a later edition of Man and Nature published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action in 1874, Marsh noted: [18]
In a former chapter I spoke of the influence of human action on the surface of the globe as immensely superior in degree to that exerted by brute animals, if not essentially different from it in kind. The eminent Italian geologist, Stoppani, goes further than I had ventured to do, and treats the action of man as a new physical element altogether sui generis. According to him, the existence of man constitutes a geological period which he designates as the Anthropozoic era. ‘The creation of man’, says he, ‘was the introduction of a new element into nature, of a force wholly unknown to earlier periods’.
The idea of a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, was proposed in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer. While some have pointed to the ideas of Marsh, Stoppani, Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky (noösphere) as precursors, others have pointed out a distinction in the geological epoch proposed by Crutzen. Whereas the effects of man proposed in the past were small and gradual, the effects are sharply marked in Crutzen's anthropocene. [19]
The Quaternary is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.58 million years ago to the present. The Quaternary Period is divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene and the Holocene ; a proposed third epoch, the Anthropocene, was rejected in 2024 by IUGS, the governing body of the ICS.
Timeline of paleontology
The Anthropocene ( ) is the name for a proposed geological epoch, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. This impact affects Earth's geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, to as recently as the 1960s. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is credited with first coining and using the term "anthropocene" informally in the 1980s; Paul J. Crutzen re-invented and popularized the term. However, in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.
Bel Paese is a semi-soft Italian cheese. It was invented in 1906 by Egidio Galbani who wanted to produce a mild and delicate cheese to sell mainly in Italy. The name Bel Paese comes from the title of a book written by Antonio Stoppani. It is Italian for "beautiful country", and is used as a phrase for Italy itself.
Paul Jozef Crutzen was a Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist. He and Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for their work on atmospheric chemistry and specifically for his efforts in studying the formation and decomposition of atmospheric ozone. In addition to studying the ozone layer and climate change, he popularized the term Anthropocene to describe a proposed new epoch in the Quaternary period when human actions have a drastic effect on the Earth. He was also amongst the first few scientists to introduce the idea of a nuclear winter to describe the potential climatic effects stemming from large-scale atmospheric pollution including smoke from forest fires, industrial exhausts, and other sources like oil fires.
Antonio Vallisneri, also rendered as Antonio Vallisnieri, was an Italian medical scientist, physician and naturalist.
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the history of Earth itself.
The Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano is a museum in Milan, Italy. It was founded in 1838 when naturalist Giuseppe de Cristoforis donated his collections to the city. Its first director was Giorgio Jan.
Dolcenera nel paese delle meraviglie is the fourth studio album by Italian singer Dolcenera, released on 18 February 2009. It is her first album released on Sony Music Italy. The lead single from the album, "Il mio amore unico", became the most successful single by Dolcenera so far, peaking at number five on the Italian Singles Chart and reaching the top spot on the Italian airplay chart.
William Lee Steffen was an American-born Australian chemist. He was the executive director of the Australian National University (ANU) Climate Change Institute and a member of the Australian Climate Commission until its dissolution in September 2013. From 1998 to 2004, he was the executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, a coordinating body of national environmental change organisations based in Stockholm. Steffen was one of the founding climate councillors of the Climate Council, with whom he frequently co-authored reports, and spoke in the media on issues relating to climate change and renewable energy.
The Monti Marsicani are the sixth-highest group of Apennines located in the Abruzzo region, mostly in the Province of L’Aquila and partly in the Province of Frosinone and Province of Isernia. The highest peak is Monte Greco (2285m). They are limited in north by the Fucino plateau and Peligna Valley, on the east by the River Gizio and Altopiano delle Cinque Miglia, on the south by the Valley Sangro and Volturno, on the east by valley Liri and Melfa.
Giuseppe Giovanni Antonio Meneghini was an Italian botanist, geologist and paleontologist.
Paleontology in the United States refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the United States. Paleontologists have found that at the start of the Paleozoic era, what is now "North" America was actually in the southern hemisphere. Marine life flourished in the country's many seas. Later the seas were largely replaced by swamps, home to amphibians and early reptiles. When the continents had assembled into Pangaea drier conditions prevailed. The evolutionary precursors to mammals dominated the country until a mass extinction event ended their reign.
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