Cruise Report SAOS14 - Stability Assessment of an Open Slope

The SAOS (Stability Assessment of an Open Slope) 2014 cruise was carried out in September 2014 (2nd-10th) on board R/V Urania, led by IAMC CNR (Naples) in collaboration with OGS (Trieste) and IGAG CNR (Roma), in the frame of Ritmare flagship-project activities. The cruise was aimed at the sampling of undisturbed stratigraphic succession of marine sediment in the surroundings of large slidescar along the slope of the South-eastern Tyrrhenian Sea to learn more on the mechanical and physical properties and pore water content of layers that are prone to fail. In low-gradient, openslope settings, translational slides are the most frequent sediment failures phenomena and generate for the reduction of the shear strength or the liquefaction of weak layers, when dynamically solicited. This approach is essential to identify layers of regional extent that may compromise the stability of a large amount of sediment along the continental margin and thus representing potential geological hazard. To achieve these objective we employed a fall-controlled coring device, to retrieve mostly undisturbed sediment sections, high resolution swath echosounder, to implement residual maps of the slide scars at seabed and high resolution multichannel seismics, to verify the extension and the relevance of regional structural lineaments and their relation with recent deformation of superficial strata packages.