Marine litter is an emerging environmental threat affecting all world’s oceans including the deep seafloor, where the extent of the phenomenon is still largely unknown. We report the spatial patterns of macro-litter distribution within the Messina Strait’s channels (Central Mediterranean), focusing on the transfer mechanisms responsible for its emplacement, a key information to better understand litter distribution. Litter is patchy but pervasive on all surveyed channels, reaching densities up to ~200 items/10 m, the highest reported for the deep sea until now. Litter is often arranged in large accumulations formed by hundreds of land-sourced items, mixed to vegetal and coarse-grained debris, indicating an emplacement from sedimentary gravity flows. Such impressive amount of litter can be explained by the superposition of a very efficient source-to-sink sedimentary transport and a strong urbanization of the coastal area. These findings point out that macro-benthic litter pollution is a major, often overlooked, threat for deep-sea ecosystems. Further explorations are thus required in similar marine settings to fully understand the magnitude of the problem, since they may represent the largest litter hotspots in the deep-sea.

Shelves from volcanic ocean islands result from the competition between two main processes, wave erosion that forms and enlarges them and volcanic progradation that reduces their dimension. In places where erosion dominates over volcanism, shelf width can be used as a proxy for the relative age of the subaerial volcanic edifices and reconstruction of their extents prior to erosion can be achieved. In this study, new multibeam bathymetry and high-resolution seismic reflection profiles are exploited to characterize the morphology of the insular shelves adjacent to each volcanic edifice of Terceira Island in order to improve the understanding of its evolution. Subaerial morphological and geological/stratigraphic data were also used to establish the connection between the onshore and offshore evolution. Shelf width contiguous to each main volcanic edifice is consistent with the known subaerial geological history of the island; most of the older edifices have wider shelves than younger ones. The shelf edge proved to be a very useful indicator in revealing the original extent of each volcanic edifice in plan view. Its depth was also used to reconstruct vertical movements, showing that older edifices like Serra do Cume-Ribeirinha, Guilherme Moniz, and Pico Alto have subsided while more recent ones have not. The morphology of the shelf (namely the absence/ presence of fresh lava flow morphologies and several types of erosional, depositional, and tectonic features) integrated with the analysis of the coastline morphology allowed us to better constrain previous geological interpretations of the island evolution.

On October 1, 2009, a small area along the Sicilian coast between the villages of Scaletta Zanclea and Giampilieri was struck by intense and concentrated rainfall causing countless small landslides widespread over the catchment area of steep subaerial creeks, locally known as Fiumara. Dense and quick debris flows were channelized within the Fiumara and destructively hit the villages and entered the sea, where they likely transformed into hyperpycnal flows. The availability of pre- and post-flood high-resolution bathymetry allows us to recognize the main features and the most significant morphological variations related to the impact of the flows on the seafloor. The passage of hyperpycnal flows on the seafloor possibly produced a suite of mass-wasting events, encompassing sheet landslides (i.e. erosive scours), retrogressive slope failure on loose sediment at the canyon headwall and rock-falls on the conglomeratic bedrock along canyon sidewall. The possible causes of these events are discussed on the basis of available morphological evidence and geotechnical considerations. Finally, the widespread occurrence of mass-wasting features (i.e. submarine landslide scars) morphologically similar to those generated by the 2009 flash flood allows us to hypothesize, from one side, a strong correlation between this catastrophic event and the evolution of submarine canyons, and from the other side, the possible use of these features for the assessment of flash-flood occurrence

Upper-flow-regime bedforms and their role in the evolution of marine and lacustrine deltas are not well understood. Wave-like undulations on delta foresets are by far the most commonly reported bedforms on deltas and it will take time before many of these features get identified as upper-flow-regime bedforms. This study aims at: (1) Providing a summary of our knowledge to date on deltaic bedforms emplaced by sediment gravity flows; (2) illustrating that these features are most likely transitional upper-flow-regime bedforms; and (3) using field case studies of two markedly different deltas in order to examine their role in the evolution of deltas. The study combines numerical analysis with digital elevation models, outcrop, borehole, and high-resolution seismic data. The Mazzarrà river delta in the Gulf of Patti, Italy, is selected to show that upper-flow-regime bedforms in gullies can be linked to the onset, growth, and evolution of marine deltas via processes of gully initiation, filling, and maintenance. Ice-marginal lacustrine deltas in Germany are selected as they illustrate the importance of unconfined upper-flow-regime bedforms in the onset and evolution of distinct delta morphologies under different lake-level trends.