COMSHELFRISKS: Promoting a Combined Approach to Investigating Risks of Earthquakes, Landslides, and Tsunamis in Coastal, Shelf, and Continental Slope Areas
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COMSHELFRISKS: Promoting a Combined Approach to Investigating Risks of Earthquakes, Landslides, and Tsunamis in Coastal, Shelf, and Continental Slope Areas |
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Shelf zones are quickly becoming new major areas of industrial technological development owing to growing population in maritime regions and vast natural resources such as fish, oil, and gas available in these areas. Therefore, understanding risks of natural and human-made hazards in these areas contributes to strengthening the scientific and technological basis of a number of industries including oil/gas production and transport. Traditional ways to evaluate risks of earthquakes and tsunamis (e.g., through analysing historic data) are often not comprehensive enough and may result in lower risks than actual risks of these hazards, while a combined approach developed recently at the Shirshov Institute provides more accurate evaluations, which may affect significantly human research and industrial activities in maritime areas. The goal of the proposed project is to disseminate information to scientific and industrial communities on combined risks of earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis to create a consortium for conducting a large-scale international project devoted to investigation of combined geo- risks in coastal, shelf, and continental slope areas of the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian seas. This goal will be achieved through preparing educational and illustrative material, including CD-ROMs and brochures for e-transmission and hard-copy distribution, organising meetings, workshops, an international conference with, and giving presentations to potential partners, planning and conducting official and personal communications devoted to the project. The setting-up of a dedicated website and continual updating with the latest news and information on on-going research and information will not only serve potential partners, but also provide information relevant for local authorities and the general public to enhance geo-hazard awareness. This will be complemented with the setting up of a network of interested parties and potential partners and creation and distribution of a regular e-newsletter for subscribers, with updates relating to the progress on the planned large-scale project and all other relevant information.
The general goal of the project is to establish an information point for potential partners in the NIS and EU concerning policies and objectives and their relevance to one of the institute’s major recent research/industrial projects. It will also disseminate information on potential future international projects on investigating combined risks of earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis in coastal, shelf, and continental slope areas.
Therefore, the major general project goal is to create a consortium of organisations in the NIS and EU capable of initiating and implementing large-scale research projects on evaluating risks of earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis in the areas of the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian seas.
Specifically, the project objectives include disseminating information on the EU RTD policies, providing training to implement a new methodology in seismic, landslide, and tsunami zoning, organising meetings and an international conference with potential partners, preparing illustrative and demonstrative material to conduct these activities, and facilitating open and effective communications with potential partners at both official and personal levels, whilst providing the necessary network and related items, e.g. website, newsletter, to ensure an efficient and uninterrupted information flow to all parties involved and interested in developments. These objectives are implemented in the project plan; and the project progress will be measured against this plan in future assessments and corrections.
A rational for implementing the know-how recently developed at the Shirshov Institute is that the traditional approach to evaluating natural geo-risks through analysing historic data may well underestimate actual risks. The new Shirshov approach has been successfully applied recently to evaluate risks of designing and building a submarine gas pipeline on the bottom of the Black Sea (“The Blue Stream” project) between Russia and Turkey. The project was a success, and its results can be expanded into other areas of the Black Sea and into the Caspian Sea. A few preliminary international contacts indicate that Mediterranean EU members are very interested in obtaining more information about and, possibly, in implementing this new approach.
Scientific activities related to the geographic scope of the project and to other natural events are given in detail on this site under the various specific headings.
Further to this the following activities have taken place:
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