In 1650 BC a tsunami caused by the eruption of the volcano on the island of Santorini, in the Aegean Sea, destroyed the Minoan navy off the coast of Crete, in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Mare Nostrum, the cradle of cultures and civilizations, has a record for tsunamis and natural disasters in the past.
But all of these past cataclysms could also be repeated in the future. “The Mediterranean is a zone which is highly vulnerable to geological risks,” explains Àngelo Camerlenghi, professor of research at ICREA the Department of Stratigraphy, Palaeontology and Marine Geosciences at the University of Barcelona (UB). The Mediterranean is a natural laboratory on a small scale, where different geological zones of scientific interest can be found: subduction zones, passive margins, large fluvial deltas like the Nile – the biggest in the world – and even continental plates that collide at the extreme edge of the ocean margins. But the Mediterranean also shows us its geological nerve in order to study the natural risk associated with potentially destructive disasters (tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, marine landslides, underwater earthquakes, meteorite impacts, etc).
Studying the complex cause and effect relationship between episodes of deep ocean instability and geological risk is the aim of MEDSLIDE, a proposal to set up a scientific project within the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme (IDOP) coordinated by researchers Àngelo Camerlenghi and Roger Urgelés from GRC Marine Geosciences part of the University of Barcelona's Geology Faculty, and with which the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and other international experts would collaborate. Along the same lines, the IODP TRANSFER project, led by Stefano Tinti and coordinated at UB by professor Miquel Canals (head of GRC Marine Geosciences), also opts to direct the gaze of scientists towards the study of geological risk at highly vulnerable points in the Mediterranean.
Underwater landslides, that in some cases happen repeatedly along the Mediterranean coasts, are the second most common cause of tsunamis (from the Japanese tsu: port and nami: wave) after earthquakes. In the Mediterranean, a small sea with a high density of population in its coastal zones, a big tsunami could have a devastating impact. “In the case of a tsunami, the waves would reach the coasts rapidly and cause serious personal and material damage,” professor Camerlenghi points out. As part of European participation in IODP, through the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), geologists are drawing up new strategies to investigate natural disasters and improve geological risk prevention in the Mediterranean and other parts of the planet. The technology used to drill into the oceanic subsoil, as well as promoting the basic science of studying the sub-oceanic structure of the Earth, is helping to resolve geological issues on a world scale opening frontiers for research into new, deep-level mineral and energy resources, tectonic plates in the oceanic lithosphere, the dynamics of biogeochemical cycles and the evolution of the Earth's climate and biology.

A map of the wells drilled by the Deep Sea Drilling Project (1968-1983) and the Ocean Drilling Program (1985-2003) in the sea beds of the planet's oceans.

Drilling Earth's seas and oceans

During the Cold War, in the mid-20th century, the scientific idea of drilling into the ocean beds revolutionised the classical idea of tectonic plates. Last March, the University of Barcelona hosted a meeting of the IOPD (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program), an international programme to drill into the marine subsoil using technologies capable of reaching 7,000 metres into the marine subsoil at depths of 11,000 metres.