Considering its substantial price, this is a remarkably plain-looking volume. At 23 × 15 cm and a thickness of less than a couple of centimetres it is smallish and uses no colour. A DVD in the back pocket provides some colour illustrations together with larger versions of all the text-figures, which is just as well as a number of those in the book are decidedly spidery and on the margins of legibility.
The book is a collection of 43 papers derived from the Third International Symposium on Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences, held in Santorini in 2007. The miscellany of topics and standards is typical of conference volumes, though this does serve to illustrate the breadth of current approaches. However, as the book has no supporting material other than a one-page Foreword (e.g. no chapter commentaries, no attempt at synthesis, no index), it lacks context and cohesion. Thus I feel that while it provides a synopsis of current activities, the content is unlikely to excite those not working in the subject.
The papers are divided into seven thematic sections, of very uneven lengths. The first, entitled ‘Role of submarine slides in margin development’, is the longest. It has ten papers, containing a lot of bathymetric imagery and seismic sections from places as diverse as the E Indian, NW African and W Iberian margins, and the Storegga and Grand Banks slides. The second section deals with the evolution of slides into debris flows, etc., partly descriptively but also through laboratory and numerical modelling. The third section has a long title, ‘New techniques, approaches and challenges in submarine slope instability and analysis’, but only two papers totaling nine pages. Section 4 (five papers) focuses on geotechnical aspects; Section 5 provides eight case histories of slides in lakes and coastal areas such as estuaries. Section 6 is another short section (two papers, eight pages), this one on volcanic island settings. (And for some reason this section calls slides submarine landslides.) Presumably the final section (ten papers) is meant to address the ‘consequences’ of the book title as it is labelled ‘Submarine mass movements and tsunamis’. However, few of the papers have much to say about tsunamis other than passing remarks about the slides being ‘tsunamigenic’. There is some identification of areas at greater risk (e.g. Alexandria, Egypt; Long Island and New Jersey, USA) and a likely tsunami scenario for the Gulf of Corinth but there is very little for anyone concerned about practical mitigation of the consequences.
The Foreword tells us that the symposium provided an ‘opportunity to review the state of the art in risk evaluation. . .and its implication for coastal and offshore development’. This is hardly reflected in the content of the book's papers. Neither am I convinced that ‘the interdisciplinary views gathered in this book. . .help identify future challenges, mitigation strategies and better management of the seafloor’. The majority of the papers are essentially descriptive case histories of various past slides. The Foreword also asserts that ‘the venue of the symposium at Santorini provided a unique incentive to present various case histories. . .around volcanic islands’. Maybe so, but it only seems to have led to two short papers, one on Santorini itself and the other just across the water at Milos Island.
In other words, the book's content has fallen some way short of the laudable aspirations of the conference. It is little more than a compilation of conference papers, a snapshot of where things are in this field: work in progress.
