Subaqueous Mass Movements and their Consequences: Advances in Process Understanding, Monitoring and Hazard Assessments

This volume focuses on underwater or subaqueous landslides with the overarching goal of understanding how they affect society and the environment. The new research presented here is the result of significant advances made over recent years in directly monitoring submarine landslides, in standardizing global datasets for quantitative analysis, constructing a global database and from leading international research projects. Subaqueous Mass Movements demonstrates the breadth of investigation taking place into subaqueous landslides and shows that, while events like the recent ones in the Indonesian archipelago can be devastating, they are at the smaller end of what the Earth has experienced in the past. Understanding the spectrum of subaqueous landslide processes, and therefore the potential societal impact, requires research across all spatial and temporal scales. This volume delivers a compilation of state-of-the-art papers covering topics from regional landslide databases to advanced techniques for in situ measurements, to numerical modelling of processes and hazards.
Subduction of an extinct rift and its role in the formation of submarine landslides in NW South America
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Published:June 11, 2020
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CiteCitation
Carlos A. Vargas, Gustavo A. Gutiérrez, Gustavo A. Sarmiento, 2020. "Subduction of an extinct rift and its role in the formation of submarine landslides in NW South America", Subaqueous Mass Movements and their Consequences: Advances in Process Understanding, Monitoring and Hazard Assessments, A. Georgiopoulou, L. A. Amy, S. Benetti, J. D. Chaytor, M. A. Clare, D. Gamboa, P. D. W. Haughton, J. Moernaut, J. J. Mountjoy
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Abstract
On the eastern margin of the Panama Basin, the Nazca oceanic plate converges towards the continental plate of South America at approximately 53 mm a−1. Subduction processes are accompanied by the presence of anomalous bathymetric elements including the Sandra Ridge. This east–west-orientated ridge is catalogued as an aborted rift derived from a magmatic spreading axis that was active between 12 and 9 Ma. Seismic activity within this structure is considered evidence of fault reactivation and tectonism. Once the structure reached the subduction trench several submarine landslides were triggered. Run-out lengths of these submarine landslides are perpendicular to...
- bathymetry
- earthquakes
- East Pacific
- fault scarps
- faults
- geologic hazards
- magmatism
- mass movements
- natural hazards
- Nazca Plate
- ocean floors
- Pacific Ocean
- Panama Basin
- plate convergence
- plate tectonics
- reactivation
- rift zones
- sea-floor spreading
- slumping
- South America
- South American Plate
- subduction
- submarine canyons
- tectonics
- Sandra Ridge