November 8-11, 2009
Austin, Texas, USA  

Two ISOS PhD candidates of the Junior Research Group (JRG) Submarine Geohazard of Prof. Sebastian Krastel attended a conference entitled Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences hosted by the Bureau of Economic Geology, Jackson School of Geosciences in Austin, Texas. The main objective of this event was to bring a world perspective of submarine mass movements and their consequences by assembling excellent contributions from active international researchers, academic institutions and the oil and gas industry thus providing full coverage of the many scientific and engineering aspects of this type of marine and coastal geo-hazard.

Katja Lindhorst, within the scope of her PhD project, investigates sliding events in Lake Ohrid (Macedonia/Albania) a transboundary lake on the Balkan Peninsula and presented a poster of a bathymetric map showing two main areas within the basin that got affected by mass wasting. My favorite talks were about case studies in lakes such as Lake Le Bourget (NW Alps) and Lake Albano (Rome, Italy). The latter presentation introduced a 3D numerical model of submerged and coastal landslide propagation that can possibly be used for a model reconstructing a major sliding event in Lake Ohrid (Udenisht slide). In Lake Le Bourget they mapped the surface topography and gave a detailed description of striking features of a mass movement important for increase the general understanding on how such slides initiated and estimate the kinematic energy of the failure.

The main advantage of such a medium size event is that during coffee and lunch breaks you are able to talk to other scientists; to discuss your own findings and hence get important input on your research. Beside research in lakes my main interest was in talks concerning tsunamigenic risk as presented during the last sessions of the conference. Overall attending this meeting was a great opportunity to exchange scientific insights on submarine mass movement, to get in contact with the scientific community working on topics that is quite complementary to my studies.

Mathias Meyer presented as part of his PhD Project, a poster showing bathymetric and high resolution multichannel seismic data of a giant submarine landslide offshore Dakar (Senegal, NW Africa). The slide is located at the passive continental margin in water depth of more than 3.000 m between confined to both sides by Canyon systems (Dakar & Diola Canyon). Due to the specialized topic of the conference, informative and interesting talks and posters related to me work have been a daily occurrence. For example talks about The Bed 5 event (NW Africa), the Ursa region (Gulf of Mexico), and the Keynote talk given by M.G. Masson about Large landslides on passive continental margins as well as talks about numerical modeling have been of special interest for me.

During a Panel Discussion entitled “Unusual Features” I got the opportunity to present seismic data addressing the controversy between sediment waves and listric faults that resulted in an interesting discussion and subsequently new input into my work.

Attending such a thematically specialized conference was an important opportunity and a great start for my first participation at a scientific conference. Being able to speak to scientists I only knew from reading their publications and putting faces to names was a significant experience. Everybody who is interested in the talks given during the conference can go to www.beg.utexas.edu/indassoc/dm2/Conference2009/prelim.htm and watch most of the talks as recorded web broadcast.

Thanks again to ISOS for financial support for traveling to Austin, Texas for attending this meeting with great importance for our PhD projects.

Katja Lindhorst
Mathias Meyer