Developing Engineering Design Criteria for Mass Gravity Flows in Deep Ocean and Continental Slope Environments

Abstract

A series of developments that led to both new understandings of mass gravity flows in the marine environment and in the techniques to quantitatively analyze them. Methods have been developed that exploit the newly emerging technical capabilities to perform very precise and detailed field investigations in deep continental slope settings that support numerical models which simulate the flows and their deposits. This combination of technologies provides a means to create engineering design criteria for mass gravity flows. In this paper, the methods that have been developed for these analyses are described and illustrated with examples.