AHEAD European Archive of Historical EArthquake DataEuropean Archive of Historical EArthquake Data

The seven islands of Corfu, Paxoi, Kephalonia, Ithaca, Lefkada, Zakynthos, and Cythera (Ionian Sea, offshore western Greece) were a British protectorate with the name of “United States of the Ionian Islands” between 1815 and 1864. Although many earthquake studies have already examined the past seismicity of this area, they contain only a few data for a handful of earthquakes, for an area known to be characterized by a high level of seismicity. Against this fragmentary seismological knowledge stands a 50 yr abundant production of local documentary sources of different types and in diverse languages. For this reason and because most of the available sources had not been yet nor systematically looked into in the search for testimonies of earthquake effects, an ad hoc and comprehensive investigation was carried out. The number of records on earthquake effects is huge as well as unexpected, and the quality of the collected records is high. The 147 new macroseismic European Macroseismic Scale 1998 intensity values, accurately assigned on the basis of independent contemporary records only, are presented in the form of timelines of earthquake effects for the main towns of the four islands of Corfu, Kephalonia, Lefkada, and Zakynthos. Besides partially amending the gaps of the knowledge of these 50 yr of seismicity in the Ionian Islands, the great amount of freshly collected data suggests that historical seismological research may effectively contribute to improving the seismic scenarios of past earthquakes in many areas of the world.

[…] and a small earthquake around 5 p.m.

The Catalogue lists earthquakes that occurred in Italy between 461 B.C. and 1997, and earthquakes that occurred in the general Mediterranean area between the VIII century b.C. and the XV century. This version (CFTI5Med) features: the retrieval and formatting of over 23,000 original bibliographic documents, transcribed or printed, nearly 50% of those utilized in the CFTI5Med. These documents are now available on-line as fully searchable pdf files; a full geological reinterpretation, georeferencing and reprocessing of over 2,300 descriptions of earthquake-induced environmental effects, which are now all available and searchable in a user-friendly web-GIS environment; the elaboration of a number of texts and commentaries that were missing from the CFTI4Med version of the catalogue; a totally re-designed and more efficient web- and web-GIS interface. The new Catalogo dei Forti Terremoti in ltalia includes 1,259 earthquakes that occurred in Italy (98 of which are currently considered false). No commentaries on the main earthquake effects were available in the previous version of the catalogue for 87 of such events as they had not been updated with respect to the information supplied in Guidoboni e Comastri (2005) for the 1000 AD-1500 AD time interval. The commentaries concerning the most significant effects of Italian medieval earthquakes have now been elaborated and are available along with the information on more recent events. For the remainder of the earthquakes first presented with the CFTI4Med - those that occurred in the general Mediterranean area away from the Italian coasts - the new catalogue provides only the felt reports and basic epicentral parameters.

Within the module NA4: "A Distributed Archive of Historical Earthquake Data" (coordinator of the module Dr. M. Stucchi) of the EU-NERIES project, the "Macroseismic Database of the Southern Balkan area" was compiled on a joint effort of ITSAK (Ch. A. Papaioannou and A.S. Savvaidis), as module Partner, and the Geophysical Laboratory of the University of Thessaloniki (B.C. Papazachos, as principal researcher, and C.B. Papazachos) for the time period 1000-1999. The database is temporarily hosted by the INGV-MI.

The source of the data (macroseismic Intensity Data Points) are:

• for the historical (before 1900) earthquakes, the books of Papazachos and Papazachou (1989, 1997, 2003) and
• for the earthquakes of the instrumental era, the bulletins of the National Observatory, the books of Papazachos and Papazachou (1989, 1997, 2003) and individual studies.