A strong shock of earthquake Of magnitude 5.9 was located between the Gulf of Naples and Capri today, March 10, at 00:03. According to what was recorded by INGV, the epicenter was located at sea, a 10 km from the coast of Capri. The hypocenter, however, was detected at 414 km deep, well below the common seismogenic depths of Italian earthquakes, which occur predominantly in the upper crust.
The magnitude of the earthquake was particularly high: to be clear, in the area of Phlegraean Fields the strongest earthquake ever measured in the instrumental era (and recorded last 30 June 2025) had a magnitude of 4.6while the Irpinia earthquake – which devastated Campania and Basilicata in 1980 with over 3,000 victims – was of magnitude 6.9.
Nonetheless, the extreme depth of the earthquake meant that the earthquake was not felt in Capri, nor in Naples and the rest of the province.
This morning, in fact, it was confirmed the absence of damage to people or buildingseven if the movement of trains – now back to normal – was slowed down as a precaution in the early hours of the morning to allow the status of the line to be verified.
From a geological point of view, the earthquake is not linked to the bradyseism of the Campi Flegrei nor to Vesuvius, but as highlighted by the INGV it is a quite rare event to be traced back to a typical geological process of Southern Tyrrhenian Sea due to the presence in the earth’s mantle of a “slab” (a plate) of oceanic lithosphere that has been sinking beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea for several million years.
Not surprisingly, this phenomenon is accompanied by a frequent seismicity along the Calabrian and Sicilian coast – and less usual off the coast of Campania –, with earthquakes that have reached in the last 40 years magnitude up to 5.8, detected on 28 and 29 October 2016 y depth included between 221km And 481 km.
