A Revision of Historical Earthquakes in the Ionian Sea, Greece: Island of Lefkada
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The central Ionian Sea is one of the most seismogenic areas in the Mediterranean Sea region. In particular, the island of Lefkada, Greece, has experienced many catastrophic earthquakes. The historical seismicity of Lefkada has been enriched and revised by utilizing published and little-known macroseismic information sources, e.g., administrative documents, letters, marginal notes, eyewitness accounts. We organized a new descriptive and parametric catalogue of 44 earthquakes having their maximum macroseismic intensity on Lefkada and covering the time interval from the 15th century AD up to 1911. Earthquake dates, origin times, intensity assignments, magnitudes and epicentral coordinates have been estimated or revised. Magnitudes in previous catalogues are overestimated with respect to our magnitude determinations which appear more re-alistic. The descriptive part of the catalogue includes descriptions of the earthquake impact on buildings but also of environmental effects, e.g., landslides and local tsunamis. The catalogue is likely complete for lower magnitude threshold Mw=6.0. One important yet puzzling earthquake is the one that reportedly damaged an unprecedentedly large region in Italy, Albania, Greece, including Lefkada, on 9/20 February 1743. Lit-tle-known documents revealed that the heavy destruction supposedly caused in Lefkada very likely was due to amalgamated information from local earthquakes and the large one.
Source: GeoHazards
Language: English
Subfield: Geophysics
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,207
OpenAlex ID: W4407240857