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Landslides

, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp 23–35 | Cite as

Impact of seismicity on Nice slope stability—Ligurian Basin, SE France: a geotechnical revisit

  • Alexander RoesnerEmail author
  • Gau­vain Wiemer
  • Stefan Kreiter
  • Stefan Wenau
  • Ting-Wei Wu
  • Françoise Courboulex
  • Volkhard Spiess
  • Achim Kopf
Original Paper
First Online:
  • 142 Downloads

Abstract

The shallow Nice submarine slope is notorious for the 1979 tsunamigenic landslide that caused eight casualties and severe infrastructural damage. Many previous studies have tackled the question whether earthquake shaking would lead to slope failure and a repetition of the deadly scenario in the region. The answers are controversial. In this study, we assess for the first time the factor of safety using peak ground accelerations (PGAs) from synthetic accelerograms from a simulated offshore Mw 6.3 earthquake at a distance of 25 km from the slope. Based on cone penetration tests (CPTu) and multichannel seismic reflection data, a coarser grained sediment layer was identified. In an innovative geotechnical approach based on uniform cyclic and arbitrary triaxial loading tests, we show that the sandy silt on the Nice submarine slope will fail under certain ground motion conditions. The uniform cyclic triaxial tests indicate that liquefaction failure is likely to occur in Nice slope sediments in the case of a Mw 6.3 earthquake 25 km away. A potential future submarine landslide could have a slide volume (7.7 × 106 m3) similar to the 1979 event. Arbitrary loading tests reveal post-loading pore water pressure rise, which might explain post-earthquake slope failures observed in the field. This study shows that some of the earlier studies offshore Nice may have overestimated the slope stability because they underestimated potential PGAs on the shallow marine slope deposits.

Keywords

Submarine landslides Liquefaction Earthquakes Post-earthquake slope failure Arbitrary triaxial loading Nice 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

We thank our French colleagues from the “Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer” for coring during their STEP 2015 oceanographic cruise DOI  https://doi.org/10.17600/15006100 on the research vessel L’Europe. Additionally, we thank the crew and scientists on board Poseidon cruise POS 500 for the seismic data acquisition. Moreover, we would like to thank Prof. Tobias Mörz for providing triaxial testing cells. Matthias Lange is thanked in memoriam for outstanding technical assistance with the DTTD. David Völker is thanked for fruitful discussions while working on this manuscript. We would like to thank Schlumberger and IHS for providing academic licenses for Vista Seismic Processing Software and Kingdom respectively.

Funding information

This work was supported by the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” via MARUM Research Center (Grants FZT15 and EXC309) in the area Seafloor Dynamics.

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© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental SciencesUniversity of BremenBremenGermany
  2. 2.Faculty of GeosciencesUniversity of BremenBremenGermany
  3. 3.Université Côte d’Azur CNRS, IRD, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, GéoazurValbonneFrance

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