No abstract

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.