Greek authorities have closed colleges and deployed emergency crews as a swarm of earthquakes intensifies close to the volcanic island of Santorini. Scientists aren’t anticipating Santorini or different volcanoes within the area to erupt, however they warn extra highly effective earthquakes may very well be coming.
Individuals on Santorini started feeling tremors final week as a cluster of underwater earthquakes broke out beneath the Mediterranean’s Aegean Sea. These small earthquakes — largely magnitude 3.5 or much less — continued to accentuate on Monday (Feb. 3).
The biggest earthquake up to now was a magnitude 5, which struck 21 miles (34 kilometers) northeast of Santorini at 2:27 p.m. native time (7.27 a.m. EST), in line with the College of Athens’ earthquake monitoring web site.
The Greek authorities have responded to the earthquakes by ordering precautionary measures on Santorini and close by islands, all of that are well-liked vacationer locations, the Related Press reported.
Santorini sits on the uncovered a part of a largely underwater volcano referred to as the Santorini caldera. Nonetheless, researchers consider the earthquakes there are pushed by the motion of plates, or plate tectonics, reasonably than volcanic exercise.
David Pyle, a professor of Earth sciences on the College of Oxford who has studied volcanos within the Santorini caldera, instructed Reside Science that the earthquakes by Santorini are seemingly brought on by a sequence of faults — or zones the place two blocks of rock transfer or slip in opposition to one another. Nonetheless, he famous that the earthquakes have been “uncommon.”
“The issue with this occasion is that we have simply seen earthquake after earthquake after earthquake,” Pyle mentioned. “It is all underwater, and so it is actually onerous to anticipate what is going on to occur subsequent.”
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The Aegean Sea sits on a small plate of crust, which is stretching because the close by African plate slides beneath the Eurasian plate. Pyle famous that stretching within the Aegean’s crust creates stresses that transfer the faults driving the earthquakes.
This is not the primary time Santorini has skilled a sequence of small, concentrated earthquakes, referred to as an earthquake swarm. Magma shifting beneath Santorini triggered a swarm across the island in 2011 and 2012, however that occasion was much less extreme than the continuing swarm, which is northeast of the island.
“The world that’s being affected is a little bit bigger [than in 2011 and 2012,] the speed at which the detected earthquakes are occurring can also be bigger, and the main target of the occasions is exterior the Santorini caldera,” Pyle mentioned.
Kolumbo volcano
Many of the earthquakes have occurred between one other underwater volcano, Kolumbo, which is roughly 4.4 miles (7 kilometers) northeast of Santorini, and the small island of Anydros. Whereas plate tectonics seem like driving the earthquakes this time, Pyle famous that researchers are not sure whether or not there is a direct hyperlink between the tectonic exercise and any potential volcanic exercise at Kolumbo.
“We truly do not actually know a lot concerning the deep methods supplying magma to the volcanos,” Pyle mentioned.
Kolumbo volcano final erupted in 1650, triggering a catastrophic tsunami that devastated islands within the area. Santorini was formed by the sooner Minoan eruption in 1600 B.C., which was one of many largest volcanic eruptions in human historical past, in line with Columbia College’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.
