WHAT IS C6
The acronym C6 means "Climatic Changes and Carbon
Cycle in Canyons and Caves". It is a monitoring project for the evaluation
of climate change signals, based on measuring sites located inside canyons and
caves. The choice of these environments is based on their morphological
structure: being more or less segregated respect the outer atmosphere, they act
as low-pass filters respect the variations of the monitored parameters,
suppressing or strongly lowering the high frequency noise, like the circadian
thermal cycles.
The C6 project
merged in the year 2005, under the scientific supervision of the Palermo Branch
of the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology
(I.N.G.V.), two different monitoring programs, active since 1999,
The former,
devoted to environmental monitoring of canyons, was promoted by the Scientific
Commission of the Italian Canyoning Association
(A.I.C.) and the no-profit association Al Qantara
(Palermo, Italy); it was based on three continuous monitoring sites in Wadi al Ghurab (Southern Jordan,
since 1999), in the Rio Grande Canyon (Northern Appennines,
Italy, since 2001) and in the Rio Grande Canyon (Vulcano
Island, Southern Italy, since 2003). In the year 2005 the Royal Society for the
Conservation of Nature of Jordan joined the C6 program, and a new site,
substituting the Whadi Al Ghurab station, was established inside the
The latter,
active since the year 1999, was focused on environmental monitoring of karst caves; the Italian NGO Legambiente,
managing the natural reserves of Santa Ninfa, Carburangeli and Sant’Angelo Muxaro caves, all three located in Sicily (Southern Italy),
promoted a monitoring program focused to verify the existence of a possible
environmental negative feedback of human fruition. Continuous and discontinuous
meteorological parameters and carbon dioxide concentrations, inside and outside
the caves, have been collected since that time.
The network was
further developed on October 2006, when a new site, after the Speleological
Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina joined the project, was activated inside a
cave not far from the city of
The latest site,
another canyon in