The contribution of italian scientists to the geology of Turkey.

Fifty years ago, Giorgio Pasquarè published the results of his studies on the volcanism of Anatolia conducted on the behalf of the mta (Maden Tektik ve Arama, Turkey’s National Geological Service). Since then, a lot of Italian scientists have carried on, with increasing continuity and frequency, scientific studies in all the fields of Earth Sciences on Anatolia, matched by a number of collaborations with the Turkish scientific community. From the middle of the last century, the Italian geological community had increasingly been attracted by the geology of Turkey, for several reasons. On one hand, the richness and variety of the geology of the region and on the other hand, the many similarities with the Italian geology. Italy and Turkey are both geologically active lands with even very large active volcanic belts, significant seismic activity, Cenozoic fold and thrust belts characterized by impressive ophiolitic sutures and both are areas rich of Earth resources, such as mineral deposits and geothermal energy. The main purpose of this Special Volume is to present a review on some of the research activities carried out by the Italian geologists in Turkey, from the early ’60s of the twentieth century to the present day. This volume arose from the request made by the organizers of the 7th Geochemistry Symposium organized by the University of Ankara in Antalya in May 2016, which hosted a special poster session, where these papers were presented. This volume starts with a historical summary of researches in the field of volcanology, petrology and statigraphy carried out by the first generation of Italian scientists between 1962 and 1982 (Manetti and Agostini: The contribution of the first Italian geologists to the knowledge of the Anatolian Cenozoic volcanism), followed by two papers about the development of volcanic activity in Western Anatolia (Agostini et alii: The Italian-Turkish collaboration on Western Anatolia volcanism and Geodynamics: state of the art) and in Central and Eastern Anatolia (Agostini et alii: Recent studies on Central and Eastern Anatolia volcanism). Two articles are targeted to the regional geology of Pontides, whose geological and stratigraphic data, together with those of geophysics, provided a major contribution to the genetic and evolutionary models of the Black Sea (Boccaletti et alii: The contribution of the Italian Geologists to the knowledge of the Pontides; Boccaletti and Manetti: The role of the Pontides for the interpretation of the origin and evolution of the Black Sea). One of the first subjects of investigations of the Italian geologists in Turkey, along with those about volcanology and petrology, was the study of ophiolitic belts in Anatolia: since 1965, a series of studies were conducted to compare the emplacement mechanisms, attitude and age between the impressive Anatolian ophiolitic complexes and those from the Northern Apennines and Corsica (Bortolotti et alii: The Italian contribution to the studies of Anatolian ophiolites). In the last decade, these studies started back with a main focus on the intra-Pontide ophiolite suture (Marroni et alii: The Italian contribution to the study of the Intra-Pontide suture zones in Central Turkey). Thermochronological studies (Cavazza and Zattin: Exhuming Anatolia: the Italian contribution to the lowtemperature thermo-chronological study of Turkey and surrounding regions) were another important field of studies, which allowed the identification of a Middle Miocene episode of cooling/exhumation along the Arabia-Eurasia collision zone as well as the existence of an Oligocene precursor of the North Anatolian Fault in the Western Marmara Sea region. The last paper (Alçiçek et alii: Extensional structures and hydrothermal fluid flow in Western Anatolia: a review from the Neogene-Quaternary Dinar and Denizli Basins) concerns one of the most important georesources of Turkey, related to impressive extensional fault structures: geothermics and thermal waters. We wish to stress that since 1966 to date there has been a continuous series of studies carried out by the Italian scientific community, without hiatuses, in cooperation with the Turkish scientific community. In the Appendix it is reported a list of publications involving Italian scientists on studies related with Anatolian geology. We believe we provided an almost complete list of published papers until 2005, although in the last ten years, the research activities of the Italian geologists in Turkey spread and had substantially increased and the papers listed in the Appendix are likely not complete. We apologize if some references were not quoted. From the publications listed in the appendix, it is also evident that there are very important research fields, which were not reviewed in the papers enclosed in this Special Volume, such as, among the others, archaeometry, marine geology, geophysics and geodynamics. Finally, the Editors acknowledge all of the authors who contributed to this volume, and M.Y. Sava¿çın and all the organizing committee of the 7th Geochemistry Symposium held in Antalya on 16-18 May 2016.