Seismic and Acoustic Monitoring of Submarine Landslides

Submarine landslides pose a hazard to coastal communities and critical seafloor infrastructure, occurring on all of the world's continental margins, from coastal zones to hadal trenches. Offshore monitoring has been limited by the largely unpredictable occurrence of submarine landslides and the need to cover large regions. Recent subsea monitoring has provided new insights into the preconditioning and run-out of submarine landslides using active geophysical techniques. However, these tools measure a small spatial footprint and are power- and memory-intensive, thus limiting long-duration monitoring. Most landslide events remain unrecorded. In this chapter, we first show how passive acoustic and seismologic techniques can record acoustic emissions and ground motions created by terrestrial landslides. This terrestrial-focused research has catalyzed advances in characterizing submarine landslides using onshore and offshore networks of broadband seismometers, hydrophones, and geophones. We discuss new insights into submarine landslide preconditioning, timing, location, velocity, and down-slope evolution arising from these advances. Finally, we outline challenges, emphasizing the need to calibrate seismic and acoustic signals generated by submarine landslides. Passive seismic and acoustic sensing has a strong potential to enable more complete hazard catalogs to be built and open the door to emerging techniques (such as fiber-optic sensing) to fill key knowledge gaps.