The eastern slope of the southern Adriatic basin: a case study of submarine landslide characterization and tsunamigenic
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER
The eastern slope of the southern Adriatic basin: a case study of submarine landslide characterization and tsunamigenic potential assessment A. Argnani • S. Tinti • F. Zaniboni • G. Pagnoni • A. Armigliato • D. Panetta R. Tonini
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Received: 9 April 2010 / Accepted: 2 April 2011 / Published online: 19 April 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract The southern Adriatic basin is the current foredeep of the Albanide fold-and-thrust belt that runs along the eastern boundary of the Adriatic basin and partly owes its remarkable water depth, deeper than 1,000 m, to the Mesozoic palaeogeography of the region. The eastern slope of the southern Adriatic basin is characterized by a thick stack of sedimentary prograding units, fed by sediments coming from the adjacent fold-and-thrust belt, which is still seismically active (e.g. 1979 Montenegro, M = 6.8). This slope presents extensive evidence of large-scale mass wasting throughout its Quaternary evolution and appears as a destructive slope system affected by progressive retreat. A submarine slide located along the eastern slope of the southern Adriatic basin has been recently characterized with good detail. The slide is of relatively small volume (0.031 km3) and shows a limited displacement, without major internal disruption. The small volume of the landslide combined with its relatively large water depth (headscarp at about 560 m and deposit at 700 m) result in a limited tsunamigenic potential, that has been assessed numerically by means of a Lagrangian block model as regards the slide motion and through a shallow-water finite-difference code for the tsunami waves propagation. Despite the almost negligible tsunami effects, the studied landslide can be taken as a lower case limit for other events
A. Argnani D. Panetta ISMAR-CNR, Istituto di Scienze Marine, Sede di Bologna, Via Gobetti 101, 40129 Bologna, Italy S. Tinti F. Zaniboni (&) G. Pagnoni A. Armigliato R. Tonini Department of Physics, Sector of Geophysics, University of Bologna, Viale Carlo Berti Pichat 8, 40127 Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
along the scarp, and the observed features concerning the generated wave and its impact on the coast can be considered valid also for bigger events. Keywords Submarine landslide Tsunami modelling Destructive slope system Southern Adriatic basin Bathymetry
Introduction The southern Adriatic basin is a sub-circular depression, more than 1,000 m deep, located between the coasts of Apulia, to the west, and Albania, Montenegro and Croatia to the east (Fig. 1). A recently acquired multibeam bathymetry along the eastern slope of the southern Adriatic basin shows that the slope presents extensive evidence of large-scale mass wasting throughout its Late Quaternary evolution (Argnani et al. 2006). The eastern slope of the southern Adriatic basin, therefore, appears as a destructive slope system affected by progressive retreat, which is mainly due to mass wasting processes. The anatomy of one of the submarine s
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