Maria Bianca Cita

Maria Bianca Cita has often been called the Lady of the abyss, or the Lady of the Mediterranean. Passionate, determined, self-confident and respected in the world, Maria Bianca was a trailblazer in the disciplines of stratigraphy, micropaleontology and marine geology in Italy and internationally.

She began her research activity with a free teaching position in Geology in 1955 at the University of Milano, and later she approached stratigraphy and micropaleontology when these disciplines where under rapid evolution, in particular studying planktonic foraminifera of Mesozoic and Cenozoic formations.  She became the first in Italy to face the problems of the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary as early as the mid 1950s. Her studies introduced the applicability of planktonic foraminiferal zonation, established in Trinidad in 1957, to the Italian and Mediterranean area, a premise that led this zonation to become the stratigraphic worldwide "standard" for the Cretaceous - Recent interval.

In the late 1960s, she became involved in scientific ocean drilling aboard the Glomar Challenger for the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), sensing that this project would revolutionize our knowledge of the history of our planet. If the Italian scientific community has had and has today the privilege to participate in scientific ocean drilling programs, it owes it largely to Maria Bianca Cita, who successfully brought Italy to the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) in 1986.

In Italy, aboard the CNR oceanographic vessel Bannock, her extraordinary intuition for geology led to a series of scientific discoveries. These include the Eastern Mediterranean anoxic basins, discovered in a 1984 expedition that generated dozens of studies and publications all over the world, the mud volcanoes then studied and drilled for decades, the 'Homogenite' megaturbidite attributed to the Minoan eruption of Santorini (hypothesis later revised, but all observations and deposition models remained hers). An incubator of lines of research that have spread globally.

The greatest scientific challenge for Maria Bianca Cita was the formulation of the theory of the desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea during the long-known Messinian salinity crisis, which according to her and co-authors Bill Ryan and Ken Hsü had involved two extraordinary processes that, although still debated, have been successively supported by a host of multidisciplinary evidence: 1) that the level of the Mediterranean dropped well below the eustatic variations during the evaporitic phase,  and 2) that the end of the salinity crisis occurred due to a mega-flood in Gibraltar. A theory that has left its mark on the scientific community, on future generations of researchers, and on public opinion.

Those who shared research in the laboratory, cruises, participation in scientific meetings, and teaching wish to remember her attitude, made of commitment, curiosity, openness and a staunch dedication to pass these values on to younger generations.