Assessment of the 1783 Scilla landslide-tsunami effects on Calabria and Sicily coasts through numerical modeling

Abstract. The 1783 Scilla tsunami, induced by a coastal landslide occurring during an intense seismic sequence in Calabria (South Italy), was one of the most lethal ever observed in Italy. It caused more than 1500 fatalities, most of which on the 10 beach close to the town where people gathered to escape earthquake shaking. In this paper, complementing a previous work (Zaniboni et al., 2016) focusing on the very local tsunami effects in the town of Scilla, we study the tsunami impact on the Calabria and Sicily coasts out of Scilla. To this purpose we take into account the same landslide geometry considered in the previous study and perform three tsunami simulations, one embracing a larger region with a 50-m computational grid, and two covering the specific area of Capo Peloro, in Sicily, facing Scilla on the western side of the Messina Straits, with even 15 higher resolution (10 m mesh). Numerical results show a very good agreement with the historical observations in Capo Peloro. Moreover, the resulting global tsunami inundation pattern provides a useful hint for tsunami hazard assessment in the Messina Straits area, which is known to be one of the most exposed to tsunami threat in Italy and in the Mediterranean Sea.

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