Laboratorio Multimediale Gola del Bottaccione - Archivio della Terra

The rocks of the Bottaccione Gorge preserve evidence associated with the end-Cretaceous extinction. The Laboratorio Multimediale interprets Walter Alvarez's discovery through the Quadrisfera, a multimedia installation about the history of the planet.

Why it matters

Gubbio's Bottaccione Gorge is an important site in the history of geology. The municipal inventory of the site presents the laboratory as the interpretive instrument of the Bottaccione, a landscape of exceptional geological, naturalistic and scenic value, and its core machine is the Quadrisfera, a multimedia installation created by Mizar, the firm founded by Paco Lanciano, a specialist of science theatre. Through a system of mirror effects and a projected film, the room reconstructs the history of the planet and lingers on the moment some sixty-five million years ago when the dinosaurs vanished after a great meteorite impact — the very event first argued from the iridium anomaly measured in the gorge's rocks by the geologist Walter Alvarez with his father Luis, a Nobel laureate. The laboratory interprets the nearby geological strata.

What to notice

The Quadrisfera's reflective installation presents a film tracing the planet's origins and the end-Cretaceous boundary event. The interpretation connects the local Scaglia Rossa limestones, deposited on an ancient sea floor over tens of millions of years, with the thin clay layer carrying the extraterrestrial signal and the use of rock strata to measure geological time. The municipality describes the installation as a laboratory for interpreting the gorge's geological features, including its strata and boundaries.

Context and history

The laboratory grew out of the municipality's project to interpret and promote the Bottaccione Gorge, whose scientific fame rests on the iridium measurements that fed the impact hypothesis of the Alvarez team, and whose stratigraphic authority was sealed when the international commission fixed the global reference for the start of the Campanian Stage in these cliffs in 2022, with the golden-spike ceremony in the gorge in 2023. Mizar, the Rome-based science-communication firm founded by Lanciano, built the Quadrisfera as a travelling concept of immersive cosmography adapted to the gorge's story. The municipality has presented exhibitions on extinction, complementing the laboratory's interpretation of the gorge and its geological discoveries.