Goro KOMATSU, International Research School of Planetary Sciences, Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Geologia, Università d'Annunzio, Italy
Catastrophic flooding is characterized by high magnitude energy and low frequency occurrence. Some of its events have occurred during the historical period, and the scientific community has gained considerable understanding of their mechanisms and implication for natural hazards. Less is known for greater-scale catastrophic flood events that are hypothesized to have occurred pre-historically. The likelihood of such events occurring in our near future maybe limited. Nevertheless, their potential consequent impacts would be enormous on the human society. The approach to assess their impacts is to investigate detailed geological records left by ancient catastrophic flood events, which provide information on the scale, frequency, geological/hydrological setting and process, and such investigations could also provide insights into the risk of natural hazards. This presentation provides and summarizes information on various catastrophic flood events recorded historically and pre-historically, and their implications for natural hazards are discussed.
Keywords: extreme geological events|catastrophic flooding|natural hazards
A103141GK