Does anybody know if there exist research over future tsunamies caused by the oil and gas industry?
The second most frequent cause of tsunamis are landslides. In submarine environment various types of landslides (or mass movements in more general terms) are common. However, to generate a tsunami the particular landslide must have certain size and what is very important - speed. There are evidences of many landslides but probably only a small portion of them could be fast enough. The role of speed as critical factor was found for Storrega slide in the Norwegian Sea by Carl Harbitz who was the first to model it.
Landslides are generated by many causes. The marine sediments, in particular those on continental slope, are susceptible to landsliding and they often need only a small trigger to initiate movement. Such trigger may come from various sources - it may be an earthquake (sometimes relatively small), but it may be also a change in pore fluids or gases pressure within the marine sediments. Oil and gas exploitation may cause such a changes and although it is unlikely that they would generate a large rapid landslide, this kind of scenarios are considered in risk analysis. As far as I know it was considered by Norwegian scientists.
The problem of landslide generated tsunamis was just reviewed in paper by Harbitz et al. which have just appeared online in "Natural Hazards" journal and is entitled: " Submarine landslide tsunamis: how extreme and how likely? " (DOI 10.1007/s11069-013-0681-3)
Eva, even if oil exploration was to trigger a landslide, the chances that the triggered landslide is large enough to generate a tsunami are extremely slim.
Regards.
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