Revisiting the February 6th 1783 Scilla (Calabria, Italy) landslide and tsunami by numerical simulation

On February 6th, 1783, a landslide of about 5 x 10(6) m(3) triggered by a 5.8 M earthquake occurred near the village of Scilla (Southern Calabria, Italy). The rock mass fell into the sea as a rock avalanche, producing a tsunami with a run-up as high as 16 m. The tsunami killed about 1,500 people, making it one of the most catastrophic tsunamis in Italian history. A combined landslide-tsunami simulation is proposed in this paper. It is based on an already performed reconstruction of the landslide, derived from subaerial and submarine investigation by means of geomorphological, geological and geomechanical surveys. The DAN3D model is used to simulate the landslide propagation both in the subaerial and in the submerged parts of the slope, while a simple linear shallow water model is applied for both tsunami generation and propagation. A satisfying back-analysis of the landslide propagation has been achieved in terms of run-out, areal distribution and thickness of the final deposit. Moreover, landslide velocities comparable to similar events reported in the literature are achieved. Output data from numerical simulation of the landslide are used as input parameters for tsunami modelling. It is worth noting that locations affected by recordable waves according to the simulation correspond to those ones recorded by historical documents. With regard to run-up heights a good agreement is achieved at some locations (Messina, Catona, Punta del Faro) between computed and real values, while in other places modelled heights are overestimated. The discrepancies, which were most significant at locations characterized by a very low slope gradient in the vicinity of the landslide, were probably caused by effects such as wave breaking, for which the adopted tsunami model does not account, as well as by uncertainties in the historical data.