Abstract
Mt. Etna is the largest and one of the best-studied volcanoes in Europe. It represents a highly active basaltic volcano on top of the active Apennine thrust belt. The instability of its eastern flank has been described as an important preconditioning factor for the occurrence of submarine mass wasting events. In order to better understand the processes that may cause submarine slope failures, a new dataset including seismic, hydroacoustic and core data was collected during RV Meteor cruise M86/2 from December 2011 to January 2012. Seismic profiles and sediment cores reveal repeated mass transport deposits (MTD), indicating a long history of landslides in the working area. Some of the sampled MTDs and their surrounding strata contain volcaniclastic debris, indicating that slope failures may be controlled by volcanic and non-volcanic processes. Several tephra layers directly cover MTDs, which is regarded as an indicator for the possibility that several flank failures occur immediately before or very early during an eruption.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the crew of RV Meteor for their help during the collection of data. The authors are thankful to Dina Vachtman and Klaus Reicherter for their reviews and constructive comments. This project was funded by the DFG and the Cluster of Excellence “The Future Ocean”.
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Gross, F. et al. (2014). Evidence for Submarine Landslides Offshore Mt. Etna, Italy. In: Krastel, S., et al. Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00972-8_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00972-8_27
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