Civil engineers designing coastal defences and other structures around the Mediterranean still need to account for the very real risk of massive impacts from tsunami waves. The latest issue of the ICE Maritime Engineering journal investigates…
Little warning from active volcanoes
There are 13 active volcanoes in the central Mediterranean area and most of the tsunami sources here lie along mainland and island coastal regions. Denis Camilleri of DHI Periti in Malta explains that tsunamis “would reach local coasts soon after they were generated” and there would be “little time for warning, varying from one to 30 minutes”.
Past disasters
The most recent Mediterranean tsunami was triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Algeria in 2003, which destroyed over 100 boats in Mallorca and flooded the Balearic capital Palma. And previously, following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in the Aegean seabed in 1956, a wave over 20m high killed 53 people as it swamped the Greek island of Amorgos.
Velocity, boulders and surge
On-shore velocities here can reach up to 13m/s, so Camilleri says civil engineers need to design for horizontal loadings of up to 400kN/m2. The force of tsunamis can be enormous and Camilleri explains how, with a tsunami surge of only 10m deep, boulders of “around 200 tonnes can be displaced inland by hundreds of metres”
Find out more about tsunamis in the Med
For more information please contact the ICE Proceedings editor Simon Fullalove on +44 (0)20 7665 2448 or email editor@ice.org.uk .