Title:Sediment Instability During Tsunamis

Synopsis:Subduction zone earthquakes create long-duration earthquake motions and tsunamis, which can significantly affect critical coastal infrastructure. Protecting critical coastal infrastructure, which is the overarching motivation for the presented work, is important for saving lives, ensuring economic rebound, and aiding the emergency response efforts following the disaster. This talk focuses on sediment instability (i.e., momentary liquefaction) caused by tsunami loading. A model for estimating the depth of momentary liquefaction and enhanced scour caused by tsunami loading is presented. The model is tested using a hypothetical tsunami, reduced-scale laboratory testing data, and field measurements from the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami, and the model is used to predict potential sediment instability due to a potential Oregon coast tsunami. Upcoming centrifuge tests, which will investigate the interaction of residual liquefaction caused by earthquake shaking and momentary liquefaction caused by ensuing tsunami loading, will be discussed.

Speaker:Ben Mason is currently an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University. Ben’s current research interests include geotechnical earthquake engineering, soil-structure interaction, fluid-soil-structure interaction, residual and momentary soil liquefaction, tsunami-induced scour and erosion, physical modeling, and coastal geotechnical engineering.