The Orleansville earthquake in 1954 produced a turbidity current on the Algerian Mediterranean margin and adjacent South Balearic basin sea floor which broke five telephone cables. The report of this event represented a cornerstone in the evolution of turbidity current theory. The resulting turbidite has been mapped on the Balearic abyssal plain for the purpose of relating flow paths and turbidite size, and areal extent to cable break locations. This study is based on 50 gravity cores.

Figure

The Orleansville turbidity current actually consisted of two currents which arrived simultaneously on the basin plain via two canyon mouths separated by 30 km. The merged turbidity currents flowed 170 km out on the basin-plain floor and covered an area of 8,000 km². The turbidite is a tongue-shaped sediment body, 50 km wide, oriented northeast-southwest. It consists of a central band of 5-cm thick sand with a fringing 2 to 3-cm thick band of coarse to fine silt. Two of the cable breaks occurred on the abyssal plain at the extreme edge of the turbidite where the sediment is only 2 cm thick. An underlying turbidite of very similar dimensions to the Orleansville turbidite is separated from it by a 10 to 15-cm pelagic sequence. The consistent spacing between these two events in icates that although the Orleansville turbidity current broke telephone cables at its extreme margins, it caused no detectable erosion on the basin-plain floor.

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