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Tsunami fingerprints along the Mediterranean coasts

  • COASTAL PROTECTION
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Abstract

The Mediterranean basin presents specific geodynamic and morphodynamic features that allow tsunami genesis. Along the entire Mediterranean coast, morphological and sedimentological evidence testify the impact of extreme waves generated by exceptional marine events, tsunami and storms. Notwithstanding the discrimination between the effect of each of them is still debated, the long-time aged presence of human settlement along the coast of the Mediterranean basin allows to correlate geological data—geomorphological, sedimentological, seismological and geochronological—with archaeological and historical archives, allowing us to ascribe field evidence to the impact of tsunami which has impacted their coasts. Both landforms and sediments analysis—washover fans, mega-boulders, anomalous sandwiched layers—permit to individuate the coastal areas impacted by these events in the time. These geological evidences are useful for hazard and vulnerability assessment; they, in combination with the coastal values, naturalistic and anthropic, allow assessing the tsunami risk to which Mediterranean coasts are exposed.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of studies performed in the framework of the scientific agreement between Protezione Civile Regione Puglia and the Department of Earth and Geo-environmental Sciences of the University of Bari. We are thankful to an anonymous reviewer for helping us to improve the quality of the paper. The paper has been realized under the umbrella of the IGCP Project n. 639 “Sea-level change from minutes to millennia” (Project Leaders: S. Engelhart, G. Hoffmann, F. Yu and A. Rosentau).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e Geoambientali, Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”, Bari, Italy

    Giovanni Scardino & Giuseppe Mastronuzzi

  2. Environmental Surveys s.r.l, Spin Off Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”, Taranto, Italy

    Arcangelo Piscitelli & Maurilio Milella

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Biologiche e Ambientali, Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Paolo Sansò

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  1. Giovanni Scardino
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  2. Arcangelo Piscitelli
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  3. Maurilio Milella
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  4. Paolo Sansò
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  5. Giuseppe Mastronuzzi
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Contributions

GS: writing and drawing; GS, MM, AP: data elaboration; GS, AP, MM, PS, GM: collecting data; GM: financial management; GM: scientific supervision and coordination.

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Correspondence to Giovanni Scardino.

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Scardino, G., Piscitelli, A., Milella, M. et al. Tsunami fingerprints along the Mediterranean coasts. Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei 31, 319–335 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-020-00895-w

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