Subsurface circulation and surface emission of geofluids are well known processes occurring both on land and offshore. When they
CJC 1293 are associated with the rise of solid material, they can originate mud volcanism, of which terrestrial examples had already been found by the ancient Greeks. These were successively described in the late XVIII century by the early land geologists who witnessed mud eruption episodes in Europe (e.g. Spallanzani, 1793), in the Carpathians and in the remote territories of the Russian empire (see Kopf, 2002). On the contrary, submarine deep sediment remobilization and cold seeps are a more recent discovery, whose study and understanding have grown concomitantly with the increasing
resolution of the marine exploration techniques, especially the sonar seabed mapping. As a consequence, the number of the newly discovered cold seeps, since when pockmarks were first imaged by King and MacLean (1970) on the Nova Scotia margin with side-scan sonar data, is continuously updated (Milkov, 2000, Judd and Hovland, 2007, Huuse et al., 2010 and Anka et al., 2012).
