Welcome All

Hi everyone,

I’m Josh and I’ll be a facilitator here on the ‘Exploring our Oceans’ course. I’m also a PhD student at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. I am part of the larger project which is evaluating the role of climate change on the frequency of submarine landslides in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The goal of the project is to determine any potential risk which may exist to the UK coastline from possible tsunamis which can be created by submarine landslides.

More information on the larger project can be found here

My current research is focussed on the timing of submarine landslides in the Iberian Abyssal Plain (IAP), off the coast of Portugal.  Landslides documented in a number of deep-sea basins offshore Portugal have been shown to respond in the long-term to climate dynamics, but also to past earthquakes. This research aims to clarify the various controls on the observed landslide events by comparing their frequency with longer term climatic variability, and to establish whether any overarching palaeoseismic influence exists from the Azores-Gibraltar boundary to the South. Our dataset consists of a deeps sea cores taken from below 4,500m depth in the IAP, which penetrate a maximum of 12m into the seabed.

Current analytical methods involve ITRAX-XRF geochemistry to establish turbidite provenance, Geotek MSCL to examine core physical properties and other geochemical methods for age determination. These methods will enable us to reconstruct landslide histories along the margin and incorporate these into the larger evaluation of landslide hazard along the Atlantic and Arctic margins.