Coastal Hazards In Southern China Using Geological Records

Project Overview

The coast of southern China is one of the most densely populated, economically important and rapidly developing regions of the world. Historical records of this area have reported frequent typhoon, big storm and even tsunami events, which have caused severe economy loss and large death toll. Thus there is an immediate and obvious need to assess the risk of catastrophic inundation events in this area.

Our project, ‘Coastal hazards in southern China using Geological records’, is designed to investigate extreme storm events in coastal areas in southern China, such as 1781 tsunami and influence of 1918 earthquake. Paleo-tsunami events have been investigated based on geological records in many areas, by distinguishing different sediment features between overwash events and normal deposits. Geological records also provide long time scale dating back to thousands of years, which could help develop the periodicity of such extreme events. Furthermore, spatial distribution of the overwash deposits indicate the area influenced by the overwash events, which helps estimate the disaster zone in these coastal areas.