Giuseppina Aliverti

Aliverti's official research began in 1920 with studies on the concentrations of electrolytic deposits. Expanding on her work on terrestrial physics, she started a line of experiments on electricity and the natural radioactivity of the atmosphere. In 1937, her work earned her the ten-year prize awarded by the Italian Society for the Progress of Sciences for Geophysical Studies.[1]

Working with physicist Giuseppe Lovera (1912–1990), and using a procedure that she developed with him (known as the Aliverti-Lovera method), she enabled researchers to calculate the radioactivity of water.[1][3] According to Linguerri, her radioactivity research was significant.

Thanks to the development of a quantitative method to measure the radioactivity of the air based on the properties of the electric effluvium, she was able to determine the contribution that radioactivity gives to the ionization of the air. In particular, she found that the atmospheric air near the continental soil always contains radon as well as the products of its disintegration and sometimes even thorium. Conversely, she detected the scarce presence of radioactivity in the sea air.[1]

Later, collaborating again with Lovera, Aliverti made notable advances in marine aerosol research. Because she was a member of a subcommittee for oceanography of Italy's National Research Council (CNR), she developed the itinerary for five scientific cruises in the Tyrrhenian Sea that were carried out between 1958 and 1960. The data collected on those trips allowed researchers to calculate the average annual evaporation of this sea and was the starting point for future surveys of the Strait of Gibraltar (1961) and the Tyrrhenian Sea (1963).[1]

Even as she pursued her primary passion of physical oceanography, Aliverti continued until her last years to study atmospheric electricity and glaciology, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Turin at Col d'Olen in the Aosta Valley. Then she studied the mountains from a mathematical perspective working with the mathematical physicist Carlo Somigliana. She was particularly interested in the Lys glacier on Monte Rosa.[1]

According to the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Milan, it maintained its own terrestrial physics observatory, which included the Aliverti-Lovera cosmic ray tool for measuring cosmic radiation.

The Observatory's activities covered meteorology, seismology, atmospheric electricity, radioactivity and cosmic radiation. After some time in fact, the Observatory was equipped with an instrument signed ALIVERTI-LOVERA and built by the well-known technicians and instrument makers MASERA and VASCHETTI of Turin. It consisted of a Wulf electrometer and four ionization chambers with a high voltage power supply. This was the first of the tools adopted to investigate radioactivity and cosmic rays; it should be remembered that in those years the ionization chambers connected to electrometers were the best and most modern tools for making this type of measurement.[4]