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Hydroacoustic Analysis of Mass Wasting Deposits in Lake Ohrid (FYR Macedonia/Albania)

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Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences

Part of the book series: Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research ((NTHR,volume 31))

Abstract

Lake Ohrid is a tectonically formed basin on the Balkan Peninsula. The Udenisht slide complex (USC), in the southwestern part of the lake, is by far the largest mass failure event within the basin. The slide deposits cover an area of ∼27 km², are up to 50 m thick, and sum up to a volume of ∼0.11 km³. The USC extends for up to 10 km into the central basin. First age estimations suggest that the USC is less than 1,500 years old. The volume of the USC is well within the range of landslide volumes capable to trigger tsunamis. However, since the slide event was retrogressive with at least two sub-events and sudden failures of major blocks are not supported by available data, no major tsunami was triggered by the USC. In contrast, subsurface and morphological indications for lake floor instabilities north of the USC suggest rotational slumping processes occurring in this area with higher possibility for tsunami generation in the future.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our Macedonian colleagues from the Hydrobiological Institute Ohrid for their logistic support. Thanks to W. Weinrebe and N. Lindhorst for their technical support. We are grateful to S. Hall and C. Berndt for valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We are grateful to comments of the reviewers P. Mazzanti and N. Waldmann that further improved the paper. This research was supported by DFG grant Kr2222/7.

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Correspondence to Katja Lindhorst .

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Lindhorst, K., Gruen, M., Krastel, S., Schwenk, T. (2012). Hydroacoustic Analysis of Mass Wasting Deposits in Lake Ohrid (FYR Macedonia/Albania). In: Yamada, Y., et al. Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2162-3_22

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