A Propaedeutic Dataset to Investigate the Submarine Landslide Area Offshore the Apulian Foreland (Eastern Taranto Gulf, Ionian Sea, Southern Italy)

ABSTRACT The outer Apulian Foreland ramp, i.e., the outer slope of the Taranto Trench is affected by submarine landslides, which may represent a geological hazard for the Ionian coastal area of Apulia. One of the major landslides is reported in the offshore Taranto, with evidence detectable in the vintage seismic reflection lines available for free. These are unmigrated and staked seismic reflection profiles as low‐resolution PDF raster images, making challenging their interpretation. The main goal of the present paper is the building of a dataset of these seismic reflection profiles, processed and improved, useful to whom interested in future investigation of this landslide area. Therefore, F75‐85, F75‐83, F75‐44, F75‐42, MT‐457‐85 and D‐482 seismic reflection profiles were transformed to SEG‐Y file. We first converted the PDF files in TIFF ones; these files, accompanied by related files in TXT format consisting of code rows, were transformed by the use of MATLAB program IMAGE2SEGY. Subsequently, the obtained SEG‐Y seismic images were enhanced by a light processing consisting in the removing the low frequency noise in DELPH Seismic software ambient. To complete the propaedeutic dataset to investigate this submarine landslide, the digitalisation of the PDF raster image of the sonic log belonging to the exploration well Sansone‐1 was performed. A CSV file was obtained after manual picking using WebPlotDigitizer. These data will allow to calculate the average velocity of the seismic P‐wave related to the lithostratigraphic units in the exploration well and, finally, to carry out the correlation between these units and the seismostratigraphic facies within the SEG‐Y reflection seismic sections.