Deep-sea deposits of the 30 december 2002 landslide

Abstract

Stromboli is a 3000-m-high, conical island-arc volcano rising to 900 m above sea level. It is the most active volcano of the Aeolian Archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea (Italy). In the last 13 Kr four large-volume (1 km3) flank collapses have played an important role in shaping the northwestern flank (Sciara del Fuoco- SdF) of the volcano. These flank collapses have the potential to cause hazardous tsunamis in the Aeolian islands and farther afield along the Italian coast. In addition, smaller volume, much more frequent partial collapses of the SdF have been shown to be tsunami generating, potentially hazardous events One such partial collapse occurred on 30/12/2002, on the north-western flank of the island. The resulting landslide generated a 10-m-high tsunami that impacted the island. Multibeam bathymetry, side-scan sonar and seabed visual observations reveal that 25-30 x 106 m3 of sediments were deposited on the offshore from the Sciara del Fuoco landslide. Sediment samples have led to the recognition of a proximal coarse-grained landslide deposit on the volcano slope and a distal, cogenetic, sandy turbidite 24 km from the Stromboli shoreline. The proximal landslide deposit consists of two contiguous facies: (1) a chaotic, coarse grained (meter- to centimetre-sized clasts) deposit and (2) a sand deposit containing a lower, cross bedded sand layer and an upper structureless, pebbly sand bed, capped by seafloor ripple bedforms. The ubiquitous sand facies develops laterally with and over the coarse-grained deposits. Distally, a capping 2-3 cm-thick sand layer, not present in a pre-landslide September 2002 core, is interpreted as the finer grained turbidite equivalent of the proximal deposits. Characteristics of the SdF landslide deposits suggest that they derive from cohesionless, sandy-matrix, density flows. Flow rheology resulted in segregation of the density flow into sand-rich and clast-rich regions. Our results show that a range of density flow transitions, based principally on particle concentration and grain-size partitioning of cohesionless parent flows, can be identified in the proximal and distaldeposits of this relatively small-scale landslide event on Stromboli.