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2021 Arkalochori Earthquake
A moment magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck the island of Crete in Greece at a depth of 6 km on 27 September 2021. The epicenter of the earthquake was located southeast of Heraklion. The quake killed one person, injured 36 (one indirect) and damaged over 5,000 old buildings on the island. Tectonic setting This region in the Mediterranean is part of the Hellenic arc and is known for its frequent and violent seismic activity and is home to Europe's deadliest earthquakes. The island of Crete in particular lies above a convergent boundary where the Aegean Sea and African plates meet, specifically the African Plate subducting beneath the Aegean Sea. The process of subduction along the Hellenic subduction zone makes the region prone to large earthquakes and tsunamis. The ~ 8.0–8.5 earthquake in Crete in 365 AD and 1303 are examples of subduction zone events. In 1810 and 1856, Crete was struck by large intermediate-depth intraplate earthquakes which were devastating and felt stron ...
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Peak Ground Acceleration
Peak ground acceleration (PGA) is equal to the maximum ground acceleration that occurred during earthquake shaking at a location. PGA is equal to the amplitude of the largest absolute acceleration recorded on an accelerogram at a site during a particular earthquake. Earthquake shaking generally occurs in all three directions. Therefore, PGA is often split into the horizontal and vertical components. Horizontal PGAs are generally larger than those in the vertical direction but this is not always true, especially close to large earthquakes. PGA is an important parameter (also known as an intensity measure) for earthquake engineering, The design basis earthquake ground motion (DBEGM) is often defined in terms of PGA. Unlike the Richter and moment magnitude scales, it is not a measure of the total energy (magnitude, or size) of an earthquake, but rather of how hard the earth shakes at a given geographic point. The Mercalli intensity scale uses personal reports and observations to me ...
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Hellenic Subduction Zone
The Hellenic subduction zone (HSZ) is the convergent boundary between the African Plate and the Aegean Sea Plate, where oceanic crust of the African is being subducted north–northeastwards beneath the Aegean. The southernmost and shallowest part of the zone is obscured beneath the deformed thick sedimentary sequence that forms the Mediterranean Ridge accretionary complex. It has a well-defined Wadati–Benioff zone of seismicity, which demonstrates the relatively shallow dip of its southern part, which increases markedly to the north of the non-volcanic part of the Hellenic arc. The descending slab has been imaged using seismic tomography down to the top of the mantle transition zone at 410 km depth. Surface expression When the subduction zone was originally identified in the 1970s, it was thought that the Hellenic trench was the surface expression of the HSZ. Once the Mediterranean Ridge was recognised as an accretionary complex, the majority of geoscientists regar ...
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Local Magnitude
The Richter scale —also called the Richter magnitude scale, Richter's magnitude scale, and the Gutenberg–Richter scale—is a measure of the strength of earthquakes, developed by Charles Francis Richter and presented in his landmark 1935 paper, where he called it the "magnitude scale". This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or . Because of various shortcomings of the original scale, most seismological authorities now use other similar scales such as the moment magnitude scale () to report earthquake magnitudes, but much of the news media still erroneously refers to these as "Richter" magnitudes. All magnitude scales retain the logarithmic character of the original and are scaled to have roughly comparable numeric values (typically in the middle of the scale). Due to the variance in earthquakes, it is essential to understand the Richter scale uses logarithms simply to make the measurements manageable (i.e., a magnitude 3 quake factors ...
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Institute Of Geodynamics
An institute is an organisational body created for a certain purpose. They are often research organisations ( research institutes) created to do research on specific topics, or can also be a professional body. In some countries, institutes can be part of a university or other institutions of higher education, either as a group of departments or an autonomous educational institution without a traditional university status such as a "university institute" (see Institute of Technology). In some countries, such as South Korea and India, private schools are sometimes referred to as institutes, and in Spain, secondary schools are referred to as institutes. Historically, in some countries institutes were educational units imparting vocational training and often incorporating libraries, also known as mechanics' institutes. The word "institute" comes from a Latin word ''institutum'' meaning "facility" or "habit"; from ''instituere'' meaning "build", "create", "raise" or "educate". ...
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Focal Mechanism
The focal mechanism of an earthquake describes the deformation in the source region that generates the seismic waves. In the case of a fault-related event it refers to the orientation of the fault plane that slipped and the slip vector and is also known as a fault-plane solution. Focal mechanisms are derived from a solution of the moment tensor for the earthquake, which itself is estimated by an analysis of observed seismic waveforms. The focal mechanism can be derived from observing the pattern of "first motions", that is, whether the first arriving P waves break up or down. This method was used before waveforms were recorded and analysed digitally and this method is still used for earthquakes too small for easy moment tensor solution. Focal mechanisms are now mainly derived using semi-automatic analysis of the recorded waveforms. Moment tensor solutions The moment tensor solution is typically displayed graphically using a so-called ''beachball'' diagram. The pattern o ...
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United States Geological Survey
The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. The organization's work spans the disciplines of biology, geography, geology, and hydrology. The USGS is a fact-finding research organization with no regulatory responsibility. The agency was founded on March 3, 1879. The USGS is a bureau of the United States Department of the Interior; it is that department's sole scientific agency. The USGS employs approximately 8,670 people and is headquartered in Reston, Virginia. The USGS also has major offices near Lakewood, Colorado, at the Denver Federal Center, and Menlo Park, California. The current motto of the USGS, in use since August 1997, is "science for a changing world". The agency's previous slogan, adopted on the occasion of its hundredth an ...
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Arkalochori 5
Arkalochori ( el, Αρκαλοχώρι) is a town and a former municipality in the Heraklion regional unit, Crete, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Minoa Pediada, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of . The town lies on the western edge of the Minoa Pediada plain, west of the Lasithi plateau, in central Crete. It contains the archaeological site of a Minoan sacred cave. The sacred cave was used from the third millennium to ca 1450 BCE, when the natural ceiling collapsed, fortuitously protecting some of the votive deposits there. Town details Located near Partira, the town is 32 km south of Heraklion and at the 2011 census the municipal unit had a population of 10,476 inhabitants. Arkalochori is 3 km south from the recently discovered Minoan palace at the small village of Galatas. G. Rethemiotakis has associated the votive objects of the Arkalochori cave with the Galatas palace. The town hosts ...
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CC-BY Icon
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics to a song, or a photograph of almost anything are all examples of "works". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by ...
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Normal Fault
In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic forces, with the largest forming the boundaries between the plates, such as the megathrust faults of subduction zones or transform faults. Energy release associated with rapid movement on active faults is the cause of most earthquakes. Faults may also displace slowly, by aseismic creep. A ''fault plane'' is the plane that represents the fracture surface of a fault. A '' fault trace'' or ''fault line'' is a place where the fault can be seen or mapped on the surface. A fault trace is also the line commonly plotted on geologic maps to represent a fault. A ''fault zone'' is a cluster of parallel faults. However, the term is also used for the zone of crushed rock along a single fault. Prolonged motion along closely spaced faults can bl ...
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Holocene
The Holocene ( ) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 cal years Before Present (), after the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene together form the Quaternary period. The Holocene has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1. It is considered by some to be an interglacial period within the Pleistocene Epoch, called the Flandrian interglacial.Oxford University Press – Why Geography Matters: More Than Ever (book) – "Holocene Humanity" section https://books.google.com/books?id=7P0_sWIcBNsC The Holocene corresponds with the rapid proliferation, growth and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all of its written history, technological revolutions, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition towards urban living in the present. The human impact on modern-era Earth and its ecosystems may be considered of global ...
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Intraplate Earthquake
The term intraplate earthquake refers to a variety of earthquake that occurs ''within the interior'' of a tectonic plate; this stands in contrast to an interplate earthquake, which occurs ''at the boundary'' of a tectonic plate. Intraplate earthquakes are often called "intraslab earthquakes", especially when occurring in microplates. Intraplate earthquakes are relatively rare compared to the more familiar boundary-located interplate earthquakes. Structures far from plate boundaries tend to lack seismic retrofitting, so large intraplate earthquakes can inflict heavy damage. Examples of damaging intraplate earthquakes are the devastating Gujarat earthquake in 2001, the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes, the 2017 Puebla earthquake, the 1811–1812 earthquakes in New Madrid, Missouri, and the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina. Fault zones within tectonic plates The surface of the Earth is made up of seven primary and eight secondary tectonic plates, plus dozens of ter ...
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1856 Heraklion Earthquake
The 1856 Heraklion earthquake, also known as the Crete earthquake or Rhodes earthquake occurred on the morning of October 12 at 02:45 am local time. This extremely catastrophic earthquake had an estimated magnitude of 7.7 to 8.3 at a depth of approximately 61 to 100 km. The earthquake was felt over a very wide area extending from Sicily, Italy to the Levant and North Africa. On the Greek island of Crete, the effects of the earthquake were cataclysmic, over 500 bodies were recovered in the city of Heraklion. Shockwaves from the earthquake were felt intensely, covering all of the Ottoman Empire; present-day Turkey, Cyprus and the Middle East where damage and human losses were reported. In Malta, the earthquake collapsed the Għajn Ħadid Tower—a coastal watchtower built around the year 1638. In Cairo, Egypt, the earthquake destroyed buildings, created seiches in canals, and killed several people. Off the Egyptian and Italian coasts, sailors reported feeling a seaquake. Tecto ...
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