In 5 hours, Southern Italy had 39 tremors. Tsunami risk is low

In five hours, Southern Italy had 39 tremors, almost all of them of low intensity, according to data from the National Institute of Geophysics.

After the first shock recorded at 14:47 pm, measuring 5,6 degrees on the Richter scale, at a depth of five kilometers, the geophysics service recorded two other very important ones, 4,1 and 4,0 degrees.

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A few hours later, Giuseppe Mastronuzzi, director of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bari declared: “we spoke with the Tsunami Warning Center of the National Institute of Geophysics and there would be no such risk”.

The series of earthquakes began shortly before three in the afternoon on Saturday, March 27, in the waters of the central Adriatic, very close to Apulia and about twenty kilometers from the Tremiti Islands. 

“It is a compressive earthquake: in practice, the mountain chains of the Dinaric Alps, pushing, converge towards the Adriatic and the Apennine chain,” said Mastronuzzi. But history teaches that something has already happened. “In general, the Adriatic Sea is at risk of a tsunami: in the sense that nothing can be ruled out. The last tsunami in the Adriatic, for example, occurred in 1970, with the Croatian city of Vela Luca completely flooded,” he said in an interview with Corriere della Sera.

Micro-zoning

Much more important is that of 1627, when a tsunami linked to an earthquake completely destroyed Lesina, in the Foggia area. “But the one in Otranto, in 1743, with waves twelve meters high, ended up destroying the city of Nardò, also in the Lecce region.” 

The territory in Puglia that is most at risk and that must be kept under control is that of the Dauno Apennines, in the Foggiano area. 

“Precisely for this reason we started a study of Microzonation along the Apennines”, explains Mastronuzzi, who adds: “In practice, in this project carried out by the Region, the CNR and our Department, we study the effect of the earthquake on a microseismic scale, which gives us allows us to go into more detail: in the coming months we will have a mapping of the seismic micronization of the Apulian Apennines.