Italy is famous for many things - pizza, pasta, excellent football and wine, as well as many other wonderful things for which millions of tourists come to this Mediterranean country every year. True, there is another glory beyond the Apennine Peninsula - catastrophic. Frequent earthquakes are as much a part of Italians' life as an afternoon siesta and a morning cup of coffee.
Why it happens?
Permanent shakes provide the peninsula with its location - it is localized at the junction of two powerful tectonic plates. It is their active geological faults that provide frequent and devastating earthquakes in Italy.
Apennines - a mountain range that passes through most regions of the country. It is she who is the result of the activity of European and African tectonic plates. Unlike other mountain systems, the Apennines in the geological aspect are quite young. And, according to the forecasts of relevant experts, the Italians will provide many more such incidents. This is confirmed by the earthquake that occurred in Amatrice.
Shake in central Italy
One of the last victims of the underground elements was a small town in the central region of Italy - Amatrice. An earthquake with a magnitude of 6 points, which occurred around midnight on August 24, 2016, destroyed a significant part of the city. Dozens of Italians died, hundreds were injured. By and large, the infrastructure of the village ceased to exist. Victims were placed in gyms, schools and other public places.
According to experts, the earthquake in Amatrich came from the epicenter, located about 10 kilometers underground. This series of powerful shocks was not the only one on the Apennine Peninsula. Over the next few days, about a hundred weak underground vibrations occurred in the central region.
The most powerful earthquakes in history
Despite the seriousness of the tragedy in Amatrich, an earthquake can be much more dangerous. Mankind knows much more deadly and destructive tremors, the victims of which are not tens, but hundreds of thousands, and material damage is billions of dollars:
- The Indian Ocean - an earthquake in December 2004. Its strength is up to 9.3 on the Richter scale. The center of tremors was located near the island of Sumatra. As a result, according to various estimates, up to 280 thousand people died. A fifteen-meter tsunami completely destroyed the infrastructure of the coast!
- Armenia is a disaster in 1988. Record tremors - 11.2 on the Richter scale! As a result of this monstrous earthquake, almost half of the country's industry was destroyed, more than 300 settlements were completely wiped off the face of the earth. And if the death toll in the disaster was relatively small - twenty-five thousand, then half a million people lost their roof over their heads. Where is Amatrice! An earthquake of such a force would have turned ancient Rome into a huge pile of debris.
- China - earthquake in 1556. What was his strength, unfortunately, was not recorded. It is only known that the tremors, the epicenter of which was the channel of the Wei River, turned the surrounding areas literally into a deserted desert! In total, almost a million people died from this almost biblical catastrophe!
Amatrice after the earthquake will recover in a couple of years, and disasters of this scale of the state have been healed for centuries.
What will happen next?
Most likely, in the next few years we will see many more events similar to the earthquake in Amatrich. Italy is a seismic hazardous area. And rely on the fact that geological processes at one point stop, at least naively. But panic is also not worth it - most of the tremors recorded on the Apennine Peninsula are located within the "green zone". Their strength rarely exceeds 3 points.