Tsunamis in the geological record: Making waves with a cautionary tale from the Mediterranean.

Sci Adv

CNRS, Laboratoire Chrono-Environnement UMR 6249, MSHE Ledoux, USR 3124, Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, UFR Sciences et Techniques, 16 Route de Gray, 25030 Besançon, France.

Published: October 2017

From 2000 to 2015, tsunamis and storms killed more than 430,000 people worldwide and affected a further >530 million, with total damages exceeding US$970 billion. These alarming trends, underscored by the tragic events of the 2004 Indian Ocean catastrophe, have fueled increased worldwide demands for assessments of past, present, and future coastal risks. Nonetheless, despite its importance for hazard mitigation, discriminating between storm and tsunami deposits in the geological record is one of the most challenging and hotly contended topics in coastal geoscience. To probe this knowledge gap, we present a 4500-year reconstruction of "tsunami" variability from the Mediterranean based on stratigraphic but not historical archives and assess it in relation to climate records and reconstructions of storminess. We elucidate evidence for previously unrecognized "tsunami megacycles" with three peaks centered on the Little Ice Age, 1600, and 3100 cal. yr B.P. (calibrated years before present). These ~1500-year cycles, strongly correlated with climate deterioration in the Mediterranean/North Atlantic, challenge up to 90% of the original tsunami attributions and suggest, by contrast, that most events are better ascribed to periods of heightened storminess. This timely and provocative finding is crucial in providing appropriately tailored assessments of coastal hazard risk in the Mediterranean and beyond.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5636206PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700485DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

geological record
8
tsunamis geological
4
record making
4
making waves
4
waves cautionary
4
cautionary tale
4
tale mediterranean
4
mediterranean 2000
4
2000 2015
4
2015 tsunamis
4

Similar Publications

Recent reconnaissance geochemical investigations have unveiled Cryogenian magmatism linked to the compressional accretionary phase, contributing to the growth of the Afif Terrane in the eastern Arabian Shield. The Cryogenian Suwaj intrusive suite, within the Afif Terrane, displays a compositional range from gabbro-diorite to tonalite-granodiorite. The uniform compositional variation is primarily due to magmatic differentiation within parental magma across multiple pulses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

During the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, the dominant mammoth steppe ecosystem across northern Eurasia vanished, in parallel with megafauna extinctions. However, plant extinction patterns are rarely detected due to lack of identifiable fossil records. Here, we introduce a method for detection of plant taxa loss at regional (extirpation) to potentially global scale (extinction) and their causes, as determined from ancient plant DNA metabarcoding in sediment cores (sedaDNA) from lakes in Siberia and Alaska over the past 28,000 years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Interpreting heavy metal variations in sedimentary records is an important approach to understand historical pollution. However, few studies have investigated the reliability of different heavy metals in sedimentary records for reconstructing historical pollution. This study retrieved two adjacent lakes' sediment cores from a remote area in North China and investigated their temporal changes in excessive metal fluxes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Provenance of late Pleistocene loess in central and eastern Europe: isotopic evidence for dominant local sediment sources.

Sci Rep

January 2025

Geochronology and Tracers Facility, British Geological Survey, Keyworth, Nottingham, NG12 5GG, UK.

Loess profiles along the Danube River provide a record of long-term Quaternary dust (loess) deposition in central-eastern Europe. Here, Sr-Nd isotopic data from four loess-palaeosol profiles (47 samples) spanning the last two-glacial-interglacial cycles are presented. The isotopic compositions generated by this study are compared with bedrock and sedimentary samples from Europe and North Africa to decipher the sources of sediment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Deep mantle earthquakes linked to CO degassing at the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Nat Commun

January 2025

Cnr-Istituto di Geologia Ambientale e Geoingegneria, Roma, Italy.

Volatiles (CO, HO) play a fundamental role in mantle melting beneath ocean spreading centers, but what role they play during the melt migration remains unknown. Using seismological data recorded by ocean-bottom seismometers, here we report the presence of deep earthquakes at 10-20 km depth in the mantle along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge axis, much below the brittle-ductile boundary. Syntheses of regional basaltic rock samples and their geochemical analyses indicate the presence of an abnormally high quantity of CO (~0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!