New Seismoacoustic Data on Shallow Gas in Holocene Marine Shelf Sediments, Offshore from the Cilento Promontory (Southern Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy)

High-resolution seismoacoustic data represent a useful tool for the investigations of gascharged
sediments occurring beneath the seabed through the identification of the diagnostic intrasedimentary
features associated with them. Acoustic blanking revealed shallow gas pockets in
the seismostratigraphic units of the inner shelf off the Northern Cilento promontory. Six main seismostratigraphic
units were recognized based on the geological interpretation of the seismic profiles.
Large shallow gas pockets, reaching a lateral extension of 1 km, are concentrated at the depocenter
of Late Pleistocene–Holocene marine sediments that are limited northwards by the Solofrone River
mouth and southwards by the Licosa Cape promontory. A morphobathymetric interpretation, reported
in a GIS environment, was constructed in order to show the main morphological lineaments
and to link them with the acoustic anomalies interpreted through the Sub-bottom chirp profiles. A
newly constructed workflow was assessed to perform data elaboration with Seismic Unix software
by comparing and improving the seismic data of the previously processed profiles that used Seisprho
software. The identification of these anomalies and the corresponding units from the offshore Cilento
promontory represent a useful basis for an assessment of marine geohazards and could help to plan
for the mitigation of geohazards in the Cilento region.