A geological and geophysical database of the Po Plain and the northern Adriatic Sea (northern Italy) as potential tool for the assessment and mitigation of natural and anthropic hazards

The Po Plain (northern Italy) hosts many urban areas where a large population lives and numerous economic activities and historical and cultural sites are located. Moreover, this area is historically affected by different geological hazards (i.e., seismic, subsidence and flooding hazards) which, in some cases, interfere each other and with human activities. For these reasons it is necessary to implement strategies for safeguarding the population, the economy and the historical and cultural heritage, first of all the evaluation and mitigation of geological hazards and the impact of human activities. This requires an accurate knowledge of the subsurface geology which, in the study area, is made possible by the availability of a large amount of subsurface data acquired for hydrocarbon exploration purposes since the early 1950s (i.e., seismic reflection profiles and wells) and many literature data. In this work, geological (i.e., stratigraphy information) and geophysical (i.e., Spontaneous Potential, Resistivity, Gamma Ray and sonic logs) public data from 160 deep wells, 61 geological cross-sections and 10 geological maps of the Po Plain and the facing northern Adriatic Sea were collected, georeferenced and digitized. The data of five geological horizons (i.e., from bottom to top, magnetic basement top, carbonate succession top, Pliocene base, the Calabrian base, and base of recent continental deposits) were also interpolated and the related unfaulted surfaces were reconstructed. In this way a simplified 3D geological model of the study area subsoil was reconstructed. The resulting dataset, consisting of both the digitized geological and geophysical data and the reconstructed geological surfaces, may be used in a wealth of applied and scientific studies, including studies for the assessment and the mitigation of geological hazards and the impact of human activities. Through the elaboration of the digitized logs, for example, it is possible to directly extract or derive mechanical and geophysical properties of the rock volume interposed between the reconstructed surfaces, such as Young’s modulus or Poisson ratio, that find applicability in geomechanical simulations aimed at evaluating the ground subsidence/uplift phenomena or the stress field change in a specific area in response to natural processes or anthropic activities, and seismic velocity values, which may be used to improve the earthquake location procedure and to reduce the uncertainties. The reconstructed 3D geological model may also be used as input-model in seismic wavepropagation and ground-motion simulations performed for defining the local seismic response. This dataset, available in open access format (Livani et al., 2023), can therefore represents a useful tool to define the most effective territorial protection strategies, particularly for urban areas, and to detect areas where further data collection and more detailed studies are needed.