Subaqueous Mass Movements and their Consequences: Assessing Geohazards, Environmental Implications and Economic Significance of Subaqueous Landslides
CONTAINS OPEN ACCESS
The challenges facing submarine mass movement researchers and engineers are plentiful and exciting. This book follows several high-profile submarine landslide disasters that have reached the world's attention over the past few years. For decades, researchers have been mapping the world's mass movements. Their significant impacts on the Earth by distributing sediment on phenomenal scales is undeniable. Their importance in the origins of buried resources has long been understood. Their hazard potential ranges from damaging to apocalyptic, frequently damaging local infrastructure and sometimes devastating whole coastlines. Moving beyond mapping advances, the subaqueous mass movement scientists and practitioners are now also focussed on assessing the consequences of mass movements, and the measurement and modelling of events, hazard analysis and mitigation. Many state-of-the-art examples are provided in this book, which is produced under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Program S4SLIDE (Significance of Modern and Ancient Submarine Slope LandSLIDEs).
New evidence for a major late Quaternary submarine landslide on the external western levee of Laurentian Fan
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Published:September 30, 2019
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CiteCitation
Alexandre Normandeau, D. Calvin Campbell, David J. W. Piper, Kimberley A. Jenner, 2019. "New evidence for a major late Quaternary submarine landslide on the external western levee of Laurentian Fan", Subaqueous Mass Movements and their Consequences: Assessing Geohazards, Environmental Implications and Economic Significance of Subaqueous Landslides, D.G. Lintern, D.C. Mosher, L.G. Moscardelli, P.T. Bobrowsky, C. Campbell, J. Chaytor, J. Clague, A. Georgiopoulou, P. Lajeunesse, A. Normandeau, D. Piper, M. Scherwath, C. Stacey, D. Turmel
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Abstract
The Laurentian Fan is one of the largest submarine fans on the western margin of the North Atlantic. Recently acquired high-resolution multibeam bathymetric data (60 m horizontal resolution) reveal a major mass-transport deposit (MTD) on the Western Levee of Western Valley (WLWV), covering >14 000 km2 in water depths from 3900 to >5000 m. Typical submarine landslide features are observed such as headscarps that in places reach the crest of the levee, crown cracks, extensional ridges, blocky debris and flow lineations. Multiple headwalls are observed on 3.5 kHz sub-bottom profiles, indicating that the landslide retrogressed upslope. While the upper parts of the MTD consist of intact blocks that were displaced downslope as ridges and troughs, the lower parts exhibit a c. 30 m thick incoherent to transparent acoustic facies, typical of debris flows. Landslide geomorphology therefore suggests that it was generated as a retrogressive spread and that slide blocks disintegrated downslope to become a blocky landslide with a surficial debris flow. The blocky landslide/debris flow extends downslope c. 90 km and partially fills a submarine channel. The superposition of the MTD filling the channel and its location at the top of the stratigraphic succession in the levee suggests that it is late Quaternary in age, possibly Holocene. Deeper seismic reflection data also show that this is a rare event during the Quaternary; it is the largest MTD observed in the upper c. 375 m of the levee succession and among the largest and deepest in the western North Atlantic.
- acoustical methods
- Atlantic Ocean
- bathymetry
- bottom features
- Canada
- Cenozoic
- chronology
- continental shelf
- debris flows
- depth
- geologic hazards
- geophysical methods
- geophysical profiles
- geophysical surveys
- high-resolution methods
- Holocene
- landslides
- levees
- marine geology
- marine methods
- mass movements
- morphology
- multibeam methods
- natural hazards
- North Atlantic
- ocean floors
- Pleistocene
- Quaternary
- regional
- Scotian Slope
- seismic methods
- seismic profiles
- slope stability
- slumping
- stratigraphy
- submarine fans
- surveys
- turbidite
- upper Pleistocene
- upper Quaternary
- West Atlantic
- Laurentian Fan