Paola Albini

The SHARE European Earthquake Catalogue (SHEEC) 1000–1899

In the frame of the European Commission project “Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE), aiming at harmonizing seismic hazard at a European scale, the compilation of a homogeneous, European parametric earthquake catalogue was planned. The goal was to be achieved by considering the most updated historical dataset and assessing homogenous magnitudes, with support from several institutions. This paper describes the SHARE European Earthquake Catalogue (SHEEC), which covers the time window 1000–1899. It strongly relies on the experience of the European Commission project “Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology” (NERIES), a module of which was dedicated to create the European “Archive of Historical Earthquake Data” (AHEAD) and to establish methodologies to homogenously derive earthquake parameters from macroseismic data. AHEAD has supplied the final earthquake list, obtained after sorting duplications out and eliminating many fake events; in addition, it supplied the most updated historical dataset. Macroseismic data points (MDPs) provided by AHEAD have been processed with updated, repeatable procedures, regionally calibrated against a set of recent, instrumental earthquakes, to obtain earthquake parameters. From the same data, a set of epicentral intensity-to-magnitude relations has been derived, with the aim of providing another set of homogeneous Mw estimates. Then, a strategy focussed on maximizing the homogeneity of the final epicentral location and Mw, has been adopted. Special care has been devoted also to supply location and Mw uncertainty. The paper focuses on the procedure adopted for the compilation of SHEEC and briefly comments on the achieved results.

The AHEAD Portal: A Gateway to European Historical Earthquake Data

Online Material: Table of macroseismic intensity symbols and color codes. The description of the seismicity of the European region is today fragmented into an increasing number of earthquake archives, databases, and catalogs related to individual countries or even to part of them. Therefore, the compilation of a comprehensive, European earthquake history requires dealing with a puzzle of partially overlapping, only partially public catalogs, the background of which is compiled according to varied schemes. One of the consequences is that earthquakes in the frontier areas are often interpreted in a conflicting way by the catalogs of the bordering countries. In the framework of the European Commission (EC), 2006–2010 Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology (NERIES) Project, the task of Networking Activity 4 (NA4) was defined precisely to conceive and develop solutions to bridge over these differences. NA4 promoted the cooperation among existing national online archives, and contributed establishing new regional online archives compiled according to common standards. As a result, a first release of the distributed European archive of historical earthquake data, for the time‐window 1000–1899 and for the large earthquakes, was published in 2010. Special attention was devoted to retrieve the earthquake background information, that is, the results of historical earthquake investigation—referenced to as studies in the following—in terms of a paper, a report, a book chapter, a map, etc. As the most useful studies are those supplying a set of macroseismic data points (MDPs)—that is a list of localities (name and coordinates) with a macroseismic intensity assessment and the related macroseismic scale—a dedicated effort was addressed to make such data available. The Archive of Historical Earthquake Data (AHEAD) distributed archive was improved and updated in the frame of the 2010–2012 EC Project Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe (SHARE), …

The Global Earthquake History

The study of earthquakes from historical sources, or historical seismology, was considered an early priority for the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) project, which commissioned a study of historical seismicity on a global scale. This was the Global Earthquake History (GEH) project, led jointly by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV; Milan, Italy) and the British Geological Survey (BGS; UK). GEH was structured around three complementary deliverables: archive, catalog, and the Web infrastructure designed to store both the archive and catalog. The Global Historical Earthquake Archive (GHEA) provides a complete account of the global situation in historical seismology for large earthquakes. From GHEA, the Global Historical Earthquake Catalogue (GHEC v1.0) was derived—a world catalog of earthquakes for the period 1000–1903, with magnitudes of Mw7 and over. Though much remains to be done, the data here presented show that the compilation of both archive and catalog contribute to an improved understanding of the Global Earthquake History.

Investigation of pre-1700 Earthquakes Between the Adda and the Middle Adige River Basins (Southern Alps)

While the seismicity of the Southern Alps is high in the Eastern sector, corresponding to the Veneto and Friuli regions, it decreases towards West up to the Adda River. In the sector between the Lessini Mts. and Eastern Friuli the damaging earthquakes are clustered in a well defined seismic belt, where seismogenic sources responsible for earthquakes with Mw 6 have been defined in recent works. In contrast, the knowledge of the Southalpine sector West of this area is sparser; the area experienced some earthquakes with Mw>5.5 and varied events with 4.8⩽Mw⩽ 5.5 the distribution of which is, apparently, random.

Large Eighteenth–Nineteenth Century Earthquakes in Western Gulf of Corinth with Reappraised Size and Location

Abstract The area of the western Gulf of Corinth around the city of Aigio (Achaea, northwest Peloponnese, Greece) represents an international pilot site for continuous monitoring and multidisciplinary research on earthquake processes. In the framework of the ANR‐SISCOR Corinth Rift Laboratory project (2011–2014), a thorough reappraisal of the five largest ( M w >6) eighteenth–nineteenth century earthquakes was performed, namely those of 14 May 1748, 23 August 1817, 26 December 1861, 9 September 1888, and 25 August 1889. Written observations of earthquake effects were looked into in their original version and language and were placed in the context from which they originated, to avoid the translations and digests on which previous seismological studies had relied. Earthquake records were traced for 108 different localities, and 143 macroseismic intensities in European Macroseismic Scale 1998 (EMS‐98) have been assigned. Earthquake‐related geological phenomena have been identified and carefully mapped, to be used as a further constraint of the location and magnitude of the associated earthquakes. Finally, new parameters for the studied earthquakes have been assessed with two separate and independent strategies to quantify epistemic uncertainties. In conclusion, the 1748, 1817, and 1888 earthquakes were located in the area of Aigio; the 1861 earthquake is reckoned to be the largest in the area, with an epicentral location at sea; whereas the 1889 earthquake has been relocated to the northwest in mainland Greece, well outside the Gulf of Corinth. Electronic Supplement: Additional material and intensity values in European Macroseismic Scale 1998 (EMS‐98) for the five studied earthquakes, and tests on deriving earthquake parameters.

Comment on the paper ‘Historical seismicity in the Middle East: new insights from Ottoman primary sources (sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries)’ by Güçlü Tülüveli (JOSE, 2015, vol. 19, 1003–1008)

This is a comment on the paper ‘Historical seismicity in the Middle East: new insights from Ottoman primary sources (sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries)’ by Güçlü Tülüveli (JOSE, 2015, vol. 19, 1003–1008). The authors comment on the sources for each of the events cited by Güçlü Tülüveli, providing for the non-specialist a better sense of how the events he lists might more accurately fit into existing knowledge of the historical seismicity of the Ottoman lands.