Progetto Nora e il mare: studio e monitoraggio di un sito archeologico costiero

Since 2011 the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padova, with the partnership of the archaeological Superintendence of Cagliari, has been dealing with the “Nora and the sea” project, aimed to render the coastal arrangement of the ancient town of Nora (CA) and to develop possible future hazard scenarios, based on the most recent studies upon sea level rise (SLR). The project evolved from the awareness of the state of emergency threatening the archaeological site, already damaged by its high hydrogeological instability and constantly endangered by sea erosion and flooding caused by SLR. The processing of a detailed survey of the site (a bathymetry of the seabed, a UAV photogrammetric model, topographic surveys) led to a digital surface model, used as a basemap on a GIS environment: trends of past SLR (Antonioli et Al. 2007) have been applied, unfolding the image of a larger ancient city, which has been exploiting and defending the shoreline by means of retaining and protection structures at least since Roman times. The research has also a current public outcome: on one hand it contributed to the fulfilment of public actions for reinforcing and preserving the most exposed areas of the site, on the other the application of the estimates of future SLR (IPCC 2013, Kopp et Al. 2016) on the DTM shows distressing scenarios for the current century, caused by global warming, and calls for larger commitment to a planned maintenance of the coast.