The Moroccan Mediterranean coast is located in
one of the area’s most vulnerable to extreme weather events
or tsunami hazards. The objective of this research is to reconstruct
the historical extreme submersion-event record using
sea-induced deposits preserved in coastal lagoon. The
Nador lagoon is the largest Moroccan lagoon (115 km2
). It
is located along the western Mediterranean, which has a high
cyclogenetic character and is exposed to tsunamis from the
Alboran Sea. The sandy barrier which separates the lagoon
from the Mediterranean Sea is marked by much overwash,
which indicate how intensely it has been exposed to the adverse
sea events through history. Using the UWITEC© gravity
coring platform, an undisturbed MC4.5 core (1.15 m long)
was successfully sampled in the studied lagoon. To identify
extreme sea events, a multi-proxy approach was applied
combining sedimentological and geochemical data. Three
paleoevents were identified; all of them are concentrated over
the last 500 years, and the most recent event corresponds to
the 1889 storm. For the others deposits, it is difficult to determine
exactly their origin; however, the high frequency of
storm events over the relevant period and the absence of historical
tsunamis evidence is more in favor of the meteorological
origin.