An updated and extended earthquake catalogue for Greece and adjacent areas since 1900

Abstract

A homogeneous earthquake catalogue for Greece and adjacent areas covering the period 1900–2009 is presented, to be used for reliable seismic hazard studies. The catalogues of Makropoulos and Burton (1981) and Makropoulos et al. (1989), covering the time span 1900–1985, were updated for the period 1986–2009 using instrumentally determined focal coordinates, except for the magnitude from the bulletin of the ISC. For <i>M</i><sub>s</sub>, which is the magnitude scale included in the previous versions, the same procedure applied since 1964 was adopted, using the ISC body wave magnitude (<i>m</i><sub>b</sub>) and a regression equation. In the present update, <i>M</i><sub>w</sub> is also calculated for the entire period 1900–2009 using a formula derived from all available moment magnitudes and directly determined by the moment tensor inversion method. Thus, a magnitude homogeneous catalogue concerning both <i>M</i><sub>s</sub> and <i>M</i><sub>w</sub> scales is presented. The extended catalogue contains 7352 events, 70% more than the 4310 events of the previous published (1989) version. The completeness test revealed that the catalogue is complete for magnitudes above 4 for the last 34 yr and that no earthquake with magnitude 6 or greater has been omitted in the whole instrumental era (1900–2009)

The SHARE European Earthquake Catalogue (SHEEC) for the time period 1900–2006 and its comparison to the European-Mediterranean Earthquake Catalogue (EMEC)

“…The differences are smaller than expected, especially for magnitudes larger than 5.5. This results from the relatively large percentage of dependent events in the EMEC data compared to the data by Makropoulos et al (2012) for SHEEC. The dependent earthquakes are not relevant for the Poissonbased hazard calculations applied in SHARE.…”

“…From the more than 13,600 earthquakes 22 new entries were added in the North Atlantic and 57 entries of volcanic earthquakes at Etna. More pronounced is the difference in the Greek and adjacent polygons, where several sources used in EMEC have been replaced by a file described in Makropoulos et al (2012). Since the delivery date of EMEC data to SHEEC was a few months before the submission of EMEC to publication, a late change in the EMEC file concerning Mw magnitudes for Iceland could not be considered in SHEEC 1900SHEEC -2006 After (1) applying the magnitude-dependent declustering of earthquakes, i.e., after selecting only the main shocks and (2) considering the magnitude-dependent completeness analysis, we expect that about a quarter of the entire data set is usable for probabilistic seismic hazard assessments.…”

“…The epicentres of 79 earthquakes, which were added to the about 13,600 EMEC entries within the SHARE study area are displayed in red. Also marked in red are the polygons "Greece" (GR), "Albania" (AL), "Macedonia" (MK) and "Bulgaria" (BG) according to G&W12 within which the data from Papazachos et al (2003Papazachos et al ( , 2009) and Roumelioti et al (2010Roumelioti et al ( , 2011 in the catalogue hierarchy of EMEC were replaced by the data from Makropoulos et al (2012) of about 0.7 units compared with the data delivered earlier at the due date to SHEEC and effects 1374 events. The differences in both versions are described and illustrated with a figure in G&W12.…”

“…Thus, this is an area where the difference between SHEEC and EMEC is significant. The above mentioned data file by Makropoulos et al (2012) is not only applied in the polygon "Greece" (see also Fig. 2), but also in the adjacent polygons to the north ("Albania", "Macedonia" and "Bulgaria").…”

Seismic hazard assessment in Polyphyto Dam area (NW Greece) and its relation with the "unexpected" earthquake of 13 May 1995 (<i>M</i><sub>s</sub> = 6.5, NW Greece)

“…Several earthquake catalogues contain data concerning the seismicity of Greece (Shebalin et al, 1974;Makropoulos and Burton, 1981;Papazachos and Comninakis, 1982;Makropoulos et al, 1989;Papazachou, 1989, 2003;Makropoulos et al, 2012). It is well established that the homogeneity of an earthquake catalogue and the respective magnitude of completeness versus time play a key role in the assessment of the seismic hazard.…”