ALBERT

Description: Submarine slope failures occur at all continental margins, but the processes generating different mass wasting phenomena remain poorly understood. Multibeam bathymetry mapping of the Middle America Trench reveals numerous continental slope failures of different dimensions and origin. For example, large rotational slumps have been interpreted to be caused by slope collapse in the wake of subducting seamounts. In contrast, the mechanisms generating translational slides have not yet been described. Lithology, shear strength measurements, density, and pore water alkalinity from a sediment core across a slide plane indicate that a few centimeters thick intercalated volcanic tephra layer marks the detachment surface. The ash layer can be correlated to the San Antonio tephra, emplaced by the 6000 year old caldera-forming eruption from Masaya-Caldera, Nicaragua. The distal deposits of this eruption are widespread along the continental slope and ocean plate offshore Nicaragua. Grain size measurements permit us to estimate the reconstruction of the original ash layer thickness at the investigated slide. Direct shear test experiments on Middle American ashes show a high volume reduction during shearing. This indicates that marine tephra layers have the highest hydraulic conductivity of the different types of slope sediment, enabling significant volume reduction to take place under undrained conditions. This makes ash layers mechanically distinct within slope sediment sequences. Here we propose a mechanism by which ash layers may become weak planes that promote translational sliding. The mechanism implies that ground shaking by large earthquakes induces rearrangement of ash shards causing their compaction (volume reduction) and produces a rapid accumulation of water in the upper part of the layer that is capped by impermeable clay. The water-rich veneer abruptly reduces shear strength, creating a detachment plane for translational sliding. Tephra layers might act as slide detachment planes at convergent margins of subducting zones, at submarine slopes of volcanic islands, and at submerged volcano slopes in lakes.

Description: [1] Sediment gravity cores collected on the Pacific slope and incoming plate offshore Central America reach up to 400 ka back in time and contain numerous ash layers from plinian eruptions at the Central American Volcanic Arc. The compositionally distinct widespread ash layers form a framework of marker horizons that allow us to stratigraphically correlate the sediment successions along and across the Middle America Trench. Moreover, ash layers correlated with 26 known eruptions on land provide absolute time lines through these successions. Having demonstrated the correlations in part 1, we here investigate implications for submarine sedimentary processes. Average accumulation rates of pelagic sediment packages constrained by bracketing tephras of known age range from ∼1–6 cm/ka on the incoming plate to 30–40 cm/ka on the continental slope. There are time intervals in which the apparent pelagic sedimentation rates significantly vary laterally both on the forearc and on the incoming plate where steady conditions are usually expected. A period of unsteadiness at 17–25 ka on the forearc coincides with a period of intense erosion on land probably triggered by tectonic processes. Unsteady conditions on the incoming plate are attributed to bend faulting across the outer rise triggering erosion and resedimentation. Extremely low apparent sedimentation rates at time intervals 〉50–80 ka suggest stronger tectonic activity than during younger times and indicate bend faulting is unsteady on a longer timescale. Submarine landslides are often associated with ash layers forming structurally weak zones used for detachment. Ash beds constrain ages of 〉60 ka, ∼19 ka, and 〈6 ka for three landslides offshore Nicaragua. Phases of intense fluid venting at mud mounds produce typical sediments around the mound that become covered by normal pelagic sediment during phases of weak or no activity. Using intercalated ash layers, we determine for the first time the durations (several hundred to 9000 years) of highly active periods in the multistage growth history of mud mounds offshore Central America, which is essential to understand general mud-mound dynamics.

Description: We present the first comprehensive study of mass wasting processes in the continental slope of a convergent margin of a subduction zone where tectonic processes are dominated by subduction erosion. We have used multibeam bathymetry along ∼1300 km of the Middle America Trench of the Central America Subduction Zone and deep-towed side-scan sonar data. We found abundant evidence of large-scale slope failures that were mostly previously unmapped. The features are classified into a variety of slope failure types, creating an inventory of 147 slope failure structures. Their type distribution and abundance define a segmentation of the continental slope in six sectors. The segmentation in slope stability processes does not appear to be related to slope preconditioning due to changes in physical properties of sediment, presence/absence of gas hydrates, or apparent changes in the hydrogeological system. The segmentation appears to be better explained by changes in slope preconditioning due to variations in tectonic processes. The region is an optimal setting to study how tectonic processes related to variations in intensity of subduction erosion and changes in relief of the underthrusting plate affect mass wasting processes of the continental slope. The largest slope failures occur offshore Costa Rica. There, subducting ridges and seamounts produce failures with up to hundreds of meters high headwalls, with detachment planes that penetrate deep into the continental margin, in some cases reaching the plate boundary. Offshore northern Costa Rica a smooth oceanic seafloor underthrusts the least disturbed continental slope. Offshore Nicaragua, the ocean plate is ornamented with smaller seamounts and horst and graben topography of variable intensity. Here mass wasting structures are numerous and comparatively smaller, but when combined, they affect a large part of the margin segment. Farther north, offshore El Salvador and Guatemala the downgoing plate has no large seamounts but well-defined horst and graben topography. Off El Salvador slope failure is least developed and mainly occurs in the uppermost continental slope at canyon walls. Off Guatemala mass wasting is abundant and possibly related to normal faulting across the slope. Collapse in the wake of subducting ocean plate topography is a likely failure trigger of slumps. Rapid oversteepening above subducting relief may trigger translational slides in the middle Nicaraguan upper Costa Rican slope. Earthquake shaking may be a trigger, but we interpret that slope failure rate is lower than recurrence time of large earthquakes in the region. Generally, our analysis indicates that the importance of mass wasting processes in the evolution of margins dominated by subduction erosion and its role in sediment dynamics may have been previously underestimated.