Abstract

The Biannual Symposium on Submarine Mass Movements and Their  Consequences (ISSMMTC) is the touchstone meeting for researchers in the field of seafloor mass instability. Since 2003 the symposium  has been held in Scandinavia, Europe, North America and Asia and has attracted a broad field of active researchers and encouraged and enabled many students to share their research and develop international connections. The symposium is currently administered under the umbrella of UNESCO grant IGCP-585 which aims to strengthen cooperation and promote the publication of scientific literature, promote fora that exchange ideas and facilitate knowledge transfer to developing countries, and improve the links between all the sectors with a stake in furthering knowledge of submarine mass movements.   The symposium has not yet been held in the Southern Hemisphere and what better place to start than New Zealand. New Zealand is a tectonically active and dynamic country with the 4th largest  EEZ in the world. The tectonic and sedimentary setting has resulted in numerous world class examples of offshore slope failure, from relatively small local scales posing tsunami hazards to coastal populations to continental margin scale collapses affecting subduction zone behaviour. In addition there are excellent examples of preserved mass transport deposits exposed onshore that can be studied in detail (and visited by participants of this symposium!). Conference themes include: - Fluids in slope instability - Geotechnical aspects of mass movement - Failure dynamics from landslide geomorphology - Tsunami generation from slope failure - Mass transport deposits in outcrop - Innovative techniques for studying mass movements - Earthquakes and submarine slope instabilities: preconditioning, triggering and paleo- seismology - Monitoring mass failure processes