The EuroMediterranean Submarine Landslide database: towards offshore geohazard quantitative assessement from submarine landslides and derived tsunamis

The Euro-Mediterranean Submarine landSlide (EMSS) database is a catalogue of submarine landslides of the Mediterranean Sea and the European continental margins of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The catalogue is compiled from data available in the literature as well as information collected from geophysical data and so far not published in the scientific literature. A first version has been recently made available online (https://ls3gp.icm.csic.es/?page_id=553) and OGC services are being developed to be available soon through the EPOS data portal (https://www.ics-c.epos-eu.org/) in the frame of the EU funded project Geo-INQUIRE. Within Geo-INQUIRE we are currently working on a second version of the catalogue improving both areal coverage in the Atlantic Ocean and information relative to the source areas (as opposed to the previous version where only deposits and scars was considered). The aim of the latter improvement is to better characterize the failure and post-failure stages of submarine landslides. The new catalogue stores polygon and polyline geospatial features related to landslide deposits, landslide source areas and landslide scars as well as information relative to age, volume, area, runout, thickness, typology, scar elevation, relevant slopes and depths as well as related metadata. The catalogue includes submarine landslides that span from Miocene to Present day, although a clear bias exists towards submarine landslides of younger age, particularly for the smaller events. The reason for this is that the older and smaller events are difficult to identify on lower resolution geophysical data sets in deep-water and large sub-surface depths. The catalogue aims to offer improved understanding of mass-wasting processes, the potentially resulting tsunamis and derived geohazard. Recent case studies using a data subset (Gulf of Cadiz, SW Iberian Margin) portray the application of such type of databases in (probabilistic) analysis of submarine slope instability and tsunami-genesis from submarine landslides. We believe the current EMSS is the seed for the world ocean submarine landslide database. In this regard, we encourage the offshore geohazards community to contribute to enlarge the database. Shapefile templates will be made available to ease the task. This work is supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement No 101058518 (Geo-INQUIRE).