Research

Geological hazards are a major societal concern nowadays. Earthquakes and submarine landslides are capable to generate tsunamis that threaten coastal communities, infrastructures and global economies. Thus, in this project we propose to generate a systematic inventory of submarine landslide events, valuable for understanding natural hazards, quantifying the relationship between landslide occurrences and seismic activity/climate/sea level variations, and evaluate where observation networks should be placed to mitigate those hazards. ESR12 will compile a landslide catalogue for the Mediterranean Sea to provide insights into the spatial/temporal statistical trends in landslide distribution and impact. The catalogue will particularly build on recently acquired and detailed information from the Alboran Sea and Gulf of Cadiz, where the concentration of geological and geophysical data is high. The candidate is expected to generate a comprehensive catalogue that allows him to identify and compile the occurrences of submarine landslides, characterize and parameterize them to derive frequency-magnitude relationships for submarine landslides in the Alboran Sea and Gulf of Cadiz, and extend this to the whole Mediterranean basin. The candidate will develop/apply stochastic methods that allow to quantify the hazard from submarine landslides in various regions of the Mediterranean Sea. The catalogue will contain the necessary information (e.g., geometry, motion-controlling characteristics and information for deriving recurrence rates) to be used as input for probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment from submarine landslides