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.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700485 | DOI Listing |
Sci Rep
January 2025
Saudi Geological Survey, P.O Box: 54141, Jeddah, 21514, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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 PDFNat Commun
January 2025
Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany.
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 PDFEnviron Pollut
January 2025
Department of Radiology, Affliated Nantong Hospital 3 of Nantong University, Nantong 226000, China. Electronic address:
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.
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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 PDFNat 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.
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