Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 18, 2203–2219, 2018 https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2203-2018 © Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Paleotsunami deposits along the coast of Egypt correlate with historical earthquake records of eastern Mediterranean Asem Salama1,2,5, Mustapha Meghraoui1,5, Mohamed El Gabry2,5, Said Maouche3,5, Moussa Hesham Hussein2,5, and Ibrahim Korrat4 1EOST-Institut de Physique du Globe – CNRS – UMR 7516, Strasbourg, France 2National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, 11421 Helwan, Egypt 3Centre Recherche Astronomie Astrophysique et Géophysique, Bouzareah, Algeria 4Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt 5North Africa Group for Earthquake and Tsunami Studies (NAGET), Ne t40/OEA ICTP, Italy Correspondence: Mustapha Meghraoui (
[email protected]) Received: 7 March 2018 – Discussion started: 12 March 2018 Revised: 5 July 2018 – Accepted: 14 July 2018 – Published: 17 August 2018 Abstract. We study the sedimentary record of past tsunamis hazards on the Egyptian coastline and the eastern Mediter- along the coastal area west of Alexandria (NW Egypt) tak- ranean regions. ing into account the occurrence of major historical earth- quakes in the eastern Mediterranean. The two selected sites at Kefr Saber ( ∼ 32 km west of Marsa-Matrouh city) and ∼ 10 km northwest of El Alamein village are coastal la- 1 Introduction goons protected by 2–20 m-high dunes parallel to the shore- line. Field data were collected by (1) coastal geomorphol- Egypt has a well-documented historical catalogue of ogy along estuaries, wedge-protected and dune-protected la- earthquakes and tsunamis recorded in ancient texts and goons; and (2) identification and spatial distribution of pale- manuscripts.