BEHAVIOR OF SHORELINE DURING KOCAELI 1999 EARTHQUAKE

The proper behavior of coastal areas and marine structures in seismic region countries like Turkey and Iran is an important concern nowadays. Coastal areas are thevital part of every countries and huge amount of financial budgets are focused on the construction of the ports and harbor facilities. The seismicity of the mentioned regions makes the performance of these areas more complicated. Although there were no huge earthquake until now affecting the shorelines of Iran, but focusing on lessons from the one of the most important earthquakes which happened in Turkey and caused so much damages to coastal areas and marine structures will be a greatexperience for the whole region. The Kocaeli earthquake of August 17, 1999 with a magnitude of 7.4 induced permanent deformation of ground due to both liquefaction and faulting and resulted heavy damage to both superstructures and infrastructures (Figure 1). As the epicenter of the earthquake was near to Izmit Bay area and it was lasted for 42 sec, with the largest horizontal acceleration of 0.407g [1], there were so many huge damages to the marine structures along the coast of the Izmit Bay. The current study summarizes the main geotechnical and hydrodynamic aspects of this earthquake on the behavior of shoreline.