Draft:Alessandro Montanari

Alessandro Montanari
Geologist Walter Alvarez with his wife Milly Alvarez and then graduate student Alessandro Montanari (right) and his wife Paula Metallo (left) at the original site where Walter Alvarez discovered the evidence for the dinosaur extinction.
Born	1954 Italy
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Urbino, Italy (BS) University of California, Berkeley (PhD)
Occupation	Independent geological scientist
Organization	Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco
Spouse	Paula Metallo
Awards	Jan Baptiste Lamarck Medal (2007)
Website	www.coldigioco.org

Alessandro Montanari (born 1954) is an Italian geologist. He is the director of the Coldigioco Geological Observatory. He is most notable for his collaboration with Walter Alvarez.

Alessandro Montanari is a remarkable scientist, with a long list of discoveries relating to Earth history. In addition he has built, starting from nothing, an important institute of geological research and teaching that now attracts researchers and students from all over the world.

— Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal 2007, Alessandro Montanari

Biography

Alessandro Montanari was born in Ancona, on July 25, 1954. In 1968, at the age of 14, he joined the Marche Speleological Group of Ancona and participated in expeditions at the Frasassi Caves and in other karst localities of the Umbria-Marche Apennines, where he conducted research in the fields of stratigraphic geology, paleoclimate, and neotectonics.

He obtained his Laurea degree in geology at the University of Urbino in 1979. Shortly afterwards he moved to the United States where, in 1986, he received his Ph.D. at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1992, he returned to Italy with his family, near the town of Apiro, inland of his birthplace of Ancona, in the Marche region of central Italy, in a semi-abandoned hilltop hamlet called Coldigioco.

He lives in Coldigioco with his wife Paula Metallo, an artist from Syracuse, USA, and has two children Fiorenza and Maxwell.

Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco

Walter Alvarez, with the support of Sandro Montanari (centre front), helped to organize a meeting of Big Historians at the Geological Observatory at Coldigioco in Italy in 2010 which resulted in the establishment of the International Big History Association.

Montanari is the director of the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco, near Ancona, in the Marche region of Italy. It is in the Apennine mountains of central Italy.

The Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco (OGC) is an independent center for research and education in geology, art, and cuisine. Located in the beautiful, tiny hilltop village of Coldigioco in the Apennine mountains of central Italy, OGC consists of sleeping, eating, and living facilities, geological labs, art studios, kitchens, and a small fleet of vehicles. Sandro Montanari and Paula Metallo run OGC with assistance from friends and colleagues from the U.S.A. and Europe.

— Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco (Geological Observatory of Coldigioco)

A considerable number of Geoscientists have collaborated with Montanari over many years, including:

• Walter Alvarez, University of California, Berkeley
• Dave Bice, Penn State University
• Christian Koeberl, University of Vienna
• Jan Smit (paleontologist), Free University of Amsterdam
• Jenn Macalady, Penn State University
• Greg Druschel, University of Vermont

Academic Achievements

By 2023 Montanari had published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers, written, edited, or co-edited several books, and has received several distinctions, including the European Geosciences Union Jan Baptiste Lamarck Medal, 2007; Fellow of the Geological Society of America, 2010; Marie Curie Fellowship 2010 from the European Commission. In 2010 he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Montanari's contributions to stratigraphy are numerous and important. He made a systematic effort to attach numerical ages to the subdivisions of the Early Tertiary by dating air-fall volcanic crystals in Umbria-Marche pelagic carbonates. His work showed that there had been only one single, large impact at the KT boundary. His team discovered evidence for multiple impact events in the rocks just below the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, later connected with Popigai in Siberia and Chesapeake in the US. He was one of the leaders of the stratigraphic research that led to Massignano, near Ancona, being selected as the global type section for the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. He has studied the stratigraphy of the Priabonian and the Eocene-Oligocene boundary for more than 20 years and has made very important contributions to this area of research. With Farley and Shoemaker, Montanari pioneered the use of helium isotopic measurements thus documenting a comet shower in the late Eocene.

Subsequently he has been involved in research aimed at establishing the GSSP for the Rupelian-Chattian and base-Tortonian sections. Montanari has done stratigraphic field studies in a number of places outside Italy, most notably in Mexico, where he was part of the team that discovered impact ejecta precisely at the KT boundary in stratigraphic sections only a few hundred km from the Chicxulub crater, thus demonstrating that that crater dates from exactly the time of the KT mass extinction.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal 2007, Alessandro Montanari

Selected Publications

Montanari, A., Koeberl, C., Schulz, T., Smith, V.C., Molnàr, M., and Tòth-Hubay, K., 2023. An airfall ash layer in the Grotta dei Baffoni cave in the Frasassi Gorge (Marche Apennine, Italy): Relevance to the Younger Dryas debate: Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, v. 450, p. 1-10.

Montanari, A., and Pignocchi, G., 2023, A new section of Upper Pleistocene alluvial-colluvial deposits in the foothills of the Marche Ridge (Apennine Mountains of central Italy): Italian Journal of Geosciences, v. 142 (3), p. 426-442.

Montanari, A., Farley, K., Coccioni, R., Sabatino, N., Bice, D., Yesko, M., Sinnesael, M., and de Winter, N., 2023, Cosmogenic 3He anomaly K1 vs. the early Campanian isotopic event (ECE) as recorded in pelagic limestones of the Umbria-Marche succession (Italy): Geological Society of America Bulletin, p. 1-15.

Montanari, A., Ferretti, M.P., Mainiero, M., McGee, D., Pignocchi, G., Recanatini, S., and Zorzin, R., 2022, Revisiting the archaeological site of Grotta dei Baffoni Cave (Frasassi Gorge, Italy): Integrated stratigraphy, archaeometry, and geochronology of upper Pleistocene–Holocene cave sediments, in Koeberl, C., Claeys, P., and Montanari, A., eds., From the Guajira Desert to the Apennines, and from Mediterranean Microplates to the Mexican Killer Asteroid: Honoring the Career ofWalter Alvarez: Geological Society of America Special Paper 557, p. 583-600.

Montanari, A., Adamek, A., Curatolo, A., Ferretti, M.P., Mainiero, M., Mariani, S., McGee, D., Pignocchi, G., and Recanatini, S., 2020, An Epigravettian hypogeal site in the Grotta del Fiume Cave at Frasassi (northeastern Apennines, Italy): Environmental and geochronologic assessments: International Journal of Speleology, v. 49(2), p. 87-105.

Montanari, A., and Coccioni, R., 2019, The serendipitous discovery of an extraterrestrial iridium anomaly at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary in Gubbio and the rise of a far-reaching theory: Bollettino della Società Paleontologica Italiana, v. 58, p. 77-83.

Sinnesael, M., Montanari, A., Frontalini, F., Coccioni, R., Gattacceca, J., Snoeck, C., Wegner, W., Koeberl, C., Morgan, L.E., de Winter, N.J., DePaolo, D.J., and Claeys, P., 2019, Multiproxy Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary event stratigraphy: An Umbria-Marche basinwide perspective, in Koeberl, C., and Bice, D.M., eds., 250 Million Years of Earth History in Central Italy: Celebrating 25 Years of the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco: Geological Society of America Special Paper 542, p. 133–158.

Montanari, A., Farley, K., Claeys, P., De Vleeschouwer, D., de Winter, N., Vansteenberge, S., Sinnesael, M., and Koeberl, C., 2017. Stratigraphic record of the asteroidal Veritas breakup in the Tortonian Monte dei Corvi section (Ancona, Italy): Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 129, p. 1357-1376.

Montanari, A., and Koeberl, C., 2000. "Impact Stratigraphy: The Italian Record": Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences, Springer, 364 pp.

Montanari, A., Beaudoin, B., Chan, L., Coccioni, R., Deino, A., DePaolo, D.J., Emmanuel, L., Fornaciari, E., S., Kruge, M., Lundblad, S., Mozzato, C., Portier, E., Renard, M., Rio, D., Sandroni, P., and Stankiewicz, A., 1997, Integrated stratigraphy of the middle to upper Miocene pelagic sequence of the Cònero Riviera (Ancona, Italy): in Miocene Stratigraphy: An Integrated Approach, A. Montanari, G.S. Odin, and R. Coccioni ed., Elsevier Science B.V. Developments in Paleontology and Stratigraphy, v. 15, p. 409-450.

Montanari, A., Chan, L.S., and Alvarez, W., 1989, Synsedimentary tectonics in the Late Cretaceous-Early Tertiary pelagic basin of the Northern Apennines: in P. Crevello, J. L. Wilson, R. Sarg, and F. Reed editors, SEPM Special Publication 44, p. 379-399.

Montanari, A. Hay, R. L., Alvarez, W., Asaro, F., Michel, H. V., Alvarez, L. W., and Smit, J., 1983, Spheroids at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary are altered impact droplets of basaltic composition: Geology, v. 11, p. 668-671.