Tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea

Abstract

The Mediterranean area has been inhabited since long time and the development of human settlements along its coastlines allowed to “record” the occurrence of natural disasters as tsunamis in different coastal settings. Nowadays, the same coastal areas host large cities and critical infrastructures and the availability of historical and geological data on the tsunamis of the past, on their characteristics and effects can significantly contribute to the development of adequate mitigation measures, defense actions and better awareness of people living along the coastlines. The knowledge of past tsunamis is one of the keys to better forecast future events: our territory is a natural laboratory where past natural events can replicate in the future with with similar characteristics. All the coastlines may be considered as the geological and geomorphological archive of past inundations. In the Mediterranean area, valuable historical evidence of past tsunamis and several paleotsunami traces exist, these were recently well organized in homogeneous and coherent geographical databases; these represent the core of this manuscript. This type of information, recently improved and enriched, allows to increase the knowledge of tsunami histories of the Mediterranean sites most prone to tsunamis, providing information on the intensity and frequency of past events.