Maria Bianca Cita can be remembered as a champion of interdisciplinarity. Starting her career as a female geologist in the 1950s, she contributed as a stratigrapher to the definition of the Planktonic foraminifera zonation established in Trinidad in 1957 for the Italian and Mediterranean region, opening the way to the global application of such zonation from the Lower Cretaceous to the Recent. Stratigraphy is essential in drilling, and she was soon invited to join DSDP Leg 2 (1968) as the first non-US Shipboard scientist and one of the two first women scientists on the Glomar Challenger, thus contributing to the definition of sea-floor spreading in the central Atlantic. Scientific ocean drilling triggered her interest in the new (at that time) discipline of Marine Geology, and her research in Italy mostly focused on the stratigraphy and sedimentology of the Mediterranean Sea. With Bill Ryan and Ken Hsü, she formulated on DSDP Leg 13 (1970) the hypothesis of Mediterranean desiccation during the Messinian salinity crisis by studying the foraminiferal microfaunas in the sediments deposited immediately after the end of the salinity crisis, documenting a sudden transition to a deep marine environment. That hypothesis prompted hundreds of publications across generations until today. She also made a series of scientific discoveries in the Mediterranean. These included deep-seated hypersaline brine lakes (a consequence of the presence of Messinian salts in the subsurface); mud volcanoes, from a sporadic finding in the Eastern Mediterranean later extended to a Mediterranean belt hosting hundreds of mud volcanoes; and the 'Homogenite' megaturbidite, originally attributed to the Minoan eruption of the Santorini volcano (the chronology was later revised, but the depositional model remained the same).
This session wishes to honor Maria Bianca Cita and her scientific legacy as an incubator of lines of research across disciplines in sedimentary geology and as an extraordinary teacher for generations of students to whom she gave exceptional opportunities.