Reconstruction of past marine submersion events (storms and tsunamis) on the North Atlantic coast of Morocco

Abstract

Abstract. The North Atlantic coast of Morocco has been affected historically by marine submersion events resulting from both storms and tsunamis and causing human and economic losses. The development of proactive adaptation strategies requires the study of these events over centennial to millennial timescales. Using a 2.7 m sediment core sampled from the Tahaddart estuary, we have been able to reconstruct past marine submersion events on this coastal area of Morocco over the last 4000 years. The high-resolution sedimentological and geochemical analysis conducted on this core allows us to identify 14 sediment layers attributed to marine high-energy events. The core was dated with isotopic techniques (137Cs, 210Pbex, 14C) and the outcomes reveal that three sediment layers are in connection with two major historical marine submersion events. The first layer mentioned as E1 seems to fit with the great Lisbon tsunami in 1755 CE (Common Era), an event dated for the first time on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The other two layers referred as E13 and E14 were dated between 3464 and 2837 cal BP and correlated with marine submersion deposits found on Spanish and Moroccan coasts, which confirms the existence of a major high-energy event (around 3200 BP) similar to the one in 1755 CE.

Review article: Extreme marine events revealed by lagoonal sedimentary records in Ghar El Melh during the last 2500 years in the northeast of Tunisia

“…The survey datasets used in this article are available open-access on Zenodo. Please find the data at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5744957 (Kohila et al, 2021).…”

“…This difference in the origin of the terrigenous inputs in Ghar El Meleh lagoon is explained by the fact that, during flood events, finer sediments are coming from the Medjerda watershed, whereas, at the time of marine storms, coarse marine sand inputs are from the barrier. In coastal environments, the principal component analysis (PCA) was usually performed on the sediment sampled around lagoons in order to characterize the different sources of sediments deposited in the lagoon (Degeai et al, 2015;Gaceur et al, 2017;Affouri et al, 2017;Khalfaoui et al, 2019) and to determine the several end-members related to potential sediment source supplies (Fig. 8).…”

“…Since these extreme hazards (storm and tsunami) are causing many sedimentary inputs in coastal areas, the recent geological records existing in this area will allow the study of these extreme events over a longer time beyond the textural and instrumental textural archives (Morton et al, 2007;Dezileau et al, 2011;Sabatier et al, 2012). This geological approach using sedimentological and geochemical analyses has been used in the French, Moroccan, and Spanish coasts (Degeai et al, 2015;Dezileau et al, 2016;Khalfaoui et al, 2019). Inversely, only a few high-resolution studies have been conducted on the Tunisian coast.…”

Temporal approaches of historical extreme storm events based on sedimentological archives

“…P. Donnelly et al, 2004;Donnelly and Woodruff, 2007;Lambert et al, 2008;Noren et al, 2002;Parris et al, 2009;Scileppi and Donnelly, 2007;Scott et al, 2003) was the first place where this characteristic method significantly developed in the early 21st century. It was then expanded worldwide with some notable examples of works in Oceania (Hayne and Chappell, 2001;May et al, 2016May et al, , 2015Nott et al, 2009;Nott and Hayne, 2001) ; Asia (Liu et al, 2001;Williams et al, 2015;Woodruff et al, 2009;Yu et al, 2009) ; Africa (Bozzano et al, 2002;Khalfaoui et al, 2019) ; in the North Sea (Chang et al, 2006;Jong et al, 2006) ; or in South America (Oliveira et al, 2014;Ramírez-Herrera et al, 2012). In western Europe, several studies have analyzed "cliff top storm deposits" (e.g.…”

Extreme Sea Surges, Tsunamis and Pluvial Flooding Events during the Last ~1000 Years in the Semi-Arid Wetland, Coquimbo Chile

“…The interpretation of proxies in these sedimentary environments is relevant to establishing meteorological events and extreme sea events of the past [31,38,39]. The identification of different depositional environments formed by the recurrence of overwash layers and associated contents allows the reconstruction of marine paleo-events [31,32,35,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52]. In this study, we reconstruct past extreme sea events (storm waves or tsunamis) and pluvial flooding events (extreme rains) using a multiproxy analysis based on sedimentological, biological and geochemical data in the Pachingo wetlands.…”