Lake Garda has not yet revealed all of its secrets. This attractive tourist destination, unique for its physical and environmental characteristics, is also a case study for several international research teams. One of these, made up of scientists from the universities of Trento and Utrecht, has just made a new and unexpected discovery: the planetary rotation significantly modifies the water movement in Lake Garda and affects deep water mixing, which is of great importance for the lake ecosystem. The results were published today in Scientific Reports, a journal of the Nature group.
The discovery is the outcome of collaboration between the Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering of the University of Trento (UniTrento) – more specifically, the research team led by Marco Toffolon – and a team at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht at Utrecht University, led by Henk Dijkstra.
"We achieved these results – Sebastiano Piccolroaz (UU) and Marina Amadori (UniTrento), who authored this work together with Toffolon and Dijkstra, say – thanks to an intense field campaign, supported by the results of numerical simulations of Lake Garda hydrodynamics, that kept our researchers busy in Trento and Utrecht for two years, from 2017 to 2018".
Read more at: Universita di Trento
Lake Garda in Trentino, Italy (Credit: @UniTrento ©GiovanniCavulli)