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.
Lessons learned from the monitoring of turbidity currents and guidance for future platform designs
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Published:June 11, 2020
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CiteCitation
Michael Clare, D. Gwyn Lintern, Kurt Rosenberger, John E. Hughes Clarke, Charles Paull, Roberto Gwiazda, Matthieu J. B. Cartigny, Peter J. Talling, Daniel Perara, Jingping Xu, Daniel Parsons, Ricardo Silva Jacinto, Ronan Apprioual, 2020. "Lessons learned from the monitoring of turbidity currents and guidance for future platform designs", 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
Turbidity currents transport globally significant volumes of sediment and organic carbon into the deep-sea and pose a hazard to critical infrastructure. Despite advances in technology, their powerful nature often damages expensive instruments placed in their path. These challenges mean that turbidity currents have only been measured in a few locations worldwide, in relatively shallow water depths (<<2 km). Here, we share lessons from recent field deployments about how to design the platforms on which instruments are deployed. First, we show how monitoring platforms have been affected by turbidity currents including instability, displacement, tumbling and damage. Second, we relate these issues to specifics of the platform design, such as exposure of large surface area instruments within a flow and inadequate anchoring or seafloor support. Third, we provide recommended modifications to improve design by simplifying mooring configurations, minimizing surface area and enhancing seafloor stability. Finally, we highlight novel multi-point moorings that avoid interaction between the instruments and the flow, and flow-resilient seafloor platforms with innovative engineering design features, such as feet and ballast that can be ejected. Our experience will provide guidance for future deployments, so that more detailed insights can be provided into turbidity current behaviour, in a wider range of settings.
- acoustic Doppler current profiler data
- Africa
- bathymetry
- British Columbia
- burial
- Canada
- currents
- damage
- deep-sea environment
- East Pacific
- engineering geology
- Fraser River delta
- infrastructure
- instruments
- marine environment
- marine installations
- marine platforms
- monitoring
- Monterey Canyon
- North Pacific
- Northeast Pacific
- ocean floors
- Pacific Coast
- Pacific Ocean
- sediment transport
- sediment traps
- stability
- submarine canyons
- transport
- turbidity currents
- West Africa
- Western Canada
- Bute Inlet
- Congo Canyon