Author(s)

G.-A. Tselentis & F. Gkika

Abstract

Corinth Canal is one of the most important civil engineering marine projects in Greece, playing a key role in marine transportation in the Mediterranean. There have been many cases during the past where significant slope instability problems resulted in the abrupt closure of the canal causing serious transportation problems. In this work, three characteristic active faults located in the adjacent area of the Corinth Canal were simulated in order to describe their effect on the canal. Causative deformations and displacements were calculated using boundary element code in 3D grids representing the two sides in the canal. These simulations were conducted in order to define the most dangerous fault which could cause secondary instability effects along the slopes of the canal and to assess the damage distribution along the axis of the canal pinpointing regions of high instability risk. Keywords: slope instability, rupture propagation, Corinth Canal, Greece. 1 Introduction Corinth Canal is one of the most important civil engineering marine projects that were constructed in Greece during the 19 th century, Figure 1. Geographically is located in the eastern border of the Corinth Gulf which is an asymmetric half- graben one of the most rapid developed intercontinental rifts in Europe. High seismicity concentration in the gulf shows that tectonic activity still takes place in this area, (e.g. Tselentis and Macropoulos [21], Billiris et al [2], Clarke et al [3], Doutsos and Kokkalas [8]).

Keywords

slope instability, rupture propagation, Corinth Canal, Greece.