Géohistoire des tempêtes et submersions marines depuis 1 000 ans : quelles interprétations climatiques dans l’ouest de la France ?

Abstract

In the current climate change context, studying coastal risks involves considering the hazard’s historical fluctuations to understand the ocean-climatic parameters that guide its variability. Thanks to the coupling of sedimentological and historical data, fifteen intense storms were extracted from a core sampled in the Traicts of the Croisic, while 128 impacting events were recorded by historical sources during the last millennium. The synthesis of sedimentological and historical works carried out in western France highlights three common stormy periods estimated at approximately 1330 – 1360 AD, 1570 – 1620 AD and 1690 – 1720 AD. These three periods are part of climate pejoration phases, or of cold tendencies. While storm activity appears to increase during North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)’s positive phases, no strict correlations are established. The change in position of the “mid-latitude storm tracks” could also explain some trajectories. To put these results into perspective and offer new prospects to improve French coastal risk management, the limits of this study are also discussed. This approach must be more exhaustive to specify the tempestuous chronology, but also extend it to the entire French Atlantic coast and thus consider all the mechanisms likely to guide their formation in Western Europe.

Keywords

• Climatology
• Sedimentology
• Historical sources
• Atlantic coast