Ifemer 2nd part-Tugdual Gauchery

        My second stay at Ifremer (Best, France), with my co-supervisor Antonio Cattaneo, lasted one month from 15/04 to the 15/05/2019 and aimed to work on the first manuscript. This tight collaboration with Antonio and other experts from Ifremer helped in the writing process. The manuscript deals with the relationships between contourite deposits and submarine landslides studied with multi- and single-channel seismic profiles. Thanks to these profiles, we could look at the evolution of the Pliocene-Pleistocene succession of the Gela Basin (Strait of Sicily, central Mediterranean Sea) from shelf to basin. The sedimentary succession recorded the re-initiation of sediment deposition after the Messinian Salinity crisis (-5.332 Ma). Our interpretation of the profiles indicates that the number of MTDs increased in the northearn sector after the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (0.8 Ma) but remained a few in the south, where they involve the entire stratigraphic succession and are larger in extent, and correspond to identified mass-wasting of contourites deposited after the second last erosional surface (ES2). ES2 is located at the base of one MTD deriving from the collapse of a contourite drift and may have acted as a glide plane.