The Holocene Storegga Slide tsunami in the United Kingdom*1

Smith, David E.; Shi, S.; Cullingford, R. A.; Dawson, Alastair; Dawson, Sue; Firth, Callum R.; Foster, Ian D L; Fretwell, Peter T.; Haggart, B. Andrew; Holloway, L. K.; Long, David A.

doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2004.04.001

Cited by 157 publications

(141 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…The last one, Storegga proper, occurred about 8150 years ago, after deglaciation. It generated a tsunami in what is now the United Kingdom (Smith et al, 2004). The Storegga slide area contains methane hydrate deposits as indicated by a seismic BSR (Bunz and Mienert, 2004;Mienert et al, 2005;Zillmer et al, 2005a, b) corresponding to the base of the hydrate stability zone at 200-300 m, and pockmarks (Hovland et al, 2005) indicating gas expulsion from the sediment.…”

Section: Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change

2007

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Abstract. Methane frozen into hydrate makes up a large reservoir of potentially volatile carbon below the sea floor and associated with permafrost soils. This reservoir intuitively seems precarious, because hydrate ice floats in water, and melts at Earth surface conditions. The hydrate reservoir is so large that if 10% of the methane were released to the atmosphere within a few years, it would have an impact on the Earth's radiation budget equivalent to a factor of 10 increase in atmospheric CO 2 .Hydrates are releasing methane to the atmosphere today in response to anthropogenic warming, for example along the Arctic coastline of Siberia. However most of the hydrates are located at depths in soils and ocean sediments where anthropogenic warming and any possible methane release will take place over time scales of millennia. Individual catastrophic releases like landslides and pockmark explosions are too small to reach a sizable fraction of the hydrates. The carbon isotopic excursion at the end of the Paleocene has been interpreted as the release of thousands of Gton C, possibly from hydrates, but the time scale of the release appears to have been thousands of years, chronic rather than catastrophic.The potential climate impact in the coming century from hydrate methane release is speculative but could be comparable to climate feedbacks from the terrestrial biosphere and from peat, significant but not catastrophic. On geologic timescales, it is conceivable that hydrates could release as much carbon to the atmosphere/ocean system as we do by fossil fuel combustion.

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Section: Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change

2007

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“…Tsunamis affecting the UK are very rare; confirmed examples include the Storegga tsunami of approximately 8000 years ago (Smith et al, 2004) and the tsunami resulting from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Dawson et al, 2000). However, the widely publicised Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the 2011 Japanese tsunami have led to a reassessment of the risk to the UK from such potentially catastrophic events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boussinesq modelling of tsunami and storm wave impact

McCabe¹,

Stansby²,

Rogers³

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Engineering

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(204 words)Many coastal protection structures in the UK have been designed for storm surges with appropriate return periods but their performance during tsunami-type waves is uncertain. A shallow water and Boussinesq (referred to as SWAB) model is well suited to the investigation of both nearshore storm waves and tsunami waves. This paper makes use of the SWAB model to compare the effect on coastal structures of solitary waves and storm waves. Wave runup parameters for both types of wave are generated, and shown to be in good agreement with experimental data.The equations behind the SWAB model were derived assuming a small bed slope, and are therefore not suitable for modelling waves interacting with vertical and near-vertical structures.However, the introduction of a reverse momentum term, to take account of a jet of water typical of a breaking wave impacting against a structure, allows wave overtopping volumes to be well predicted although it had a minor effect on the forces acting on the structure. Comparisons with experimental data, both with solitary waves and storm waves, are presented. Using this model, the difference between the impact, in terms of wave forces and wave overtopping, of tsunami waves and storm waves for a given structure is investigated. Keywords chosen from ICE Publishing listCoastal engineering; Sea defences; Computational mechanics. List of notation (examples below)constant controlling linear dispersion in SWAB model

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“…Perhaps the most well-known tsunamigenic slope failure in the Northern Hemisphere is the 8150-year BP Storegga slide, the only known prehistoric submarine slope failure with extensive geological evidence for a catastrophic region-wide tsunami (Bondevik et al 2005a;Smith et al 2004). The Storegga slide was not generated by tectonic activity and occurred on the edge of the continental shelf offshore of western Norway (Fig.…”

Section: Mass Burials In Relatively Tectonically Inactive Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Geological evidence can be traced from Norway to Greenland, western Scotland, NE England and Denmark (e.g. Bondevik et al 2005a;Long et al 2016;Smith et al 2004). The effects of this tsunami on the Mesolithic forager populations of western and eastern Scotland were immediate and long-lasting (Waddington and Wicks 2017;Wicks and Mithen 2014).…”

Section: Mass Burials In Relatively Tectonically Inactive Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prehistoric Coastal Mass Burials: Did Death Come in Waves?

Cain

Goff

McFadgen

2018

J Archaeol Method Theory

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Recent large tsunamis in the twenty-first century have provided graphic reminders of the catastrophic impacts such natural hazards can have upon coastal communities. Death tolls in the thousands give rise to the rapid adoption of coastal mass burials for the interment of the dead. While recognised as a necessary practice in the aftermath of such contemporary tragedies, the paucity of coastal mass burial sites related to earlier tsunamis reported in the archaeological record is unusual. We establish a suite of criteria for identifying the geological and archaeological evidence of inundation by past tsunamis and review case studies from two well-documented prehistoric coastal mass burial sites in the Southern Hemisphere (Solomon Islands and Vanuatu). To varying degrees, both sites possess numerous characteristics that suggest direct correlation with previously reported catastrophic palaeotsunamis. In the Northern Hemisphere, we investigate palaeotsunami inundation as an alternative hypothesis for mass burial sites in Orkney and Shetland, a relatively tectonically inactive region where such an association is unlikely to have ever been considered. The nature, chronology and location of these mass burial sites fit well with the proposed archaeological evidence for palaeotsunami inundation, and they also appear to be contemporaneous with the as-yet poorly documented Garth tsunami (~5500 years BP). We suggest that a potentially key diagnostic criterion for determining a palaeotsunami linkage is the use of diatom testing on skeletal remains to establish whether death was caused by drowning in saltwater, a test which has never been applied in this context. J Archaeol Method Theory

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The Holocene Storegga Slide tsunami in the United Kingdom*1

Cited by 157 publications

References 71 publications

Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change

Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change

Boussinesq modelling of tsunami and storm wave impact

Prehistoric Coastal Mass Burials: Did Death Come in Waves?

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