Giovanni Leone (geophysicist)
Italian geophysicist and volcanologist
Giovanni Leone (10 February 1967 in Agrigento) is an Italian geophysicist and volcanologist. His main activity is the study of planetary geology and volcanology of the Solar System.
In 2014 Leone proposed that the Valles Marineris on Mars was formed by lava and not water. In the same year, he published the results of his 3D computer simulations showing that the Martian dichotomy was formed by the Great South Polar Impact as an alternative hypothesis to the Great North Polar Impact. Some 2D models of the Large South Polar Impact were already developed by other authors since 2006.
In 2016, Leone found a confirmation of this hypothesis with the discovery of 12 volcanic alignments in the southern hemisphere of Mars, just as the 3D model had predicted. His observations of large Martian canyons and networks of lava channels from volcanoes, together with the presence of olivine unaltered since the Noachian, are challenging past visions of a hot and humid Mars with an Earth-like environment.
Biography
Leone spent his first six years in Agrigento.after which his family moved to Palermo. As a child he soon showed a strong interest in science and astronomy. At the age of 15, his father gave him a portable Newton telescope with a diameter of 114 mm, with which he began to observe the sky both from his home and from the Madonie mountains with his childhood companion, the astrophotographer Carmelo Zannelli.
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This entry incorporates text from “Giovanni Leone (geophysicist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.