A violent earthquake of magnitude 6.0 He hit Greece, with an epicenter not far from the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, last night at1:51 (local time, 00:51 in Italy). The earthquake recorded a depth of 57 km And it was felt distinctly throughout the Hellenic archipelago as well as in the coasts of Sicily, Puglia and Calabria, as also recorded by the seismographs of the Ingv. At the precautionary level, the authorities also decided to branch out a tsunami alert for the area, asking the inhabitants of Kasos, Rhodes and Karpathos to get away from the coast. Fortunately, at now the seamoti have not yet been recorded.
As anticipated, the estimated magnitude of the event is of 6.0, even if this value may vary slightly depending on the institution that calculated it. The INGV, for example, estimates it to 5.9, while the USGS confirms the 6.0. These are minimal differences due to different calculation systems: in the next few hours the data will be further processed and the values will probably tend to converge. In any case, it is a rather intense shock which, as we have anticipated, was felt in most of the Greek peninsula.
From a geological point of view, the causes of this earthquake are to be found in the subduction between the plaque African and that Eurasian. This is clearly seen from the image below:
The black line below Greece represents the margin between the two plates and each of the colored balls represents a historical earthquake occurred in the area: the larger the ball it is, the more powerful that earthquake was. It is therefore a historically seismic area and today’s earthquake, however strong, it is certainly not an exception.
