CFTI5Med, the new release of the catalogue of strong earthquakes in Italy and in the Mediterranean area

Abstract

A key element for assessing seismic hazard and risk is the availability of a comprehensive dataset on past earthquakes. Here we present the rationale, structure and contents of CFTI5Med (10.6092/ingv.it-cfti5), the 2018 version of the Catalogue of Strong Earthquakes in Italy: a large multidisciplinary effort including historians, seismologists and geologists. It was conceived in 1989, following the inception of GIS technology, and first published in 1995 to offer a full account of Italy’s strongest earthquakes, of their territorial impact and associated social and economic upheaval. Subsequent versions (1997, 2000, 2007) entailed a fine tuning of research methodologies, included additional research on Italian earthquakes, and were extended to large earthquakes of the Mediterranean area. CFTI5Med comprised an opportunity to streamline the structure of the Catalogue database and propose a renovated user interface. The new front-end (1) grants an easier, intuitive access to the data, including earthquake effects on the environment, and (2) allows all data to be displayed jointly with relevant topographic, geological and seismological overlays published as web services.

The relationships between regional Quaternary uplift, deformation across active normal faults and historical seismicity in the upper plate of subduction zones: The Capo D’Orlando Fault, NE Sicily.

“…Quaternary [Monaco and Tortorici, 2000;Jacques et al, 2001;Giunta et al, 2012;Roberts et al, 2013]. The locations of historical damaging earthquakes from Italian catalogues [Guidoboni et al, 2007;Stucchi et al, 2013] lie close to these mapped normal faults [Monaco and Tortorici, 2000;Galli et al, 2008;Roberts et al, 2013] . Potential seismogenic sources have been collated within the Database of Individual Seismogenic Source (DISS) [Basili et al, 2008], providing a base from which to define the geography of seismic hazard in Italy.…”

“…However, we ask whether the locations of all active normal faults that can be considered to be candidate seismogenic sources are known. For example, even though two well-documented medium-magnitude historical seismic events have been reported [Guidoboni et al, 2007] around the Capo D'Orlando area, in NE Sicily, only a few studies [Scicchitano et al, 2011;Giunta et al, 2012] have attempted to identify plausible potential seismogenic sources, such as the Capo D'Orlando Fault. These authors recognised that Quaternary palaeoshorelines are tilted and hence deformed by the Capo D'Orlando Fault, suggesting the fault is active.…”

The 1905 Chamonix earthquakes: active tectonics in the Mont Blanc and Aiguilles Rouges massifs

“…This corresponds to intensity VI MSK-64 according to Levret et al (1988), and V-VI in both the MSK-64 and EMS-98 scales (Alasset 2005), and not to VII as postulated in SisFrance (2016). Furthermore, macroseismic epicentres of the April 29 (E1-bis) and August 13 events are very similar for Guidoboni et al (2007). They are located 4km north of the August 13 SisFrance (2016) macroseismic epicentre (E2, Fig.…”

“…3). The location of the macroseismic epicentre according to SisFrance (2016) is labelled E1 in Figure 3; the location after Guidoboni et al (2007) is about 10km toward the SE (E1-bis in Fig. 3).…”

Catalogue of the Geological Effects of Earthquakes in Spain Based on the ESI-07 Macroseismic Scale: A New Database for Seismic Hazard Analysis

“…In this way, as noted by Serva [2] after the devastating 2011 Japan earthquake-tsunami (Tohoku) the IAEA recommended to the members states to carefully consider secondary earthquake ground effects in order to envisage a more accurate definition of the seismic hazard (in terms of intensity) in zones with nuclear installations [47] and the ESI-07 scale was largely considered in the published recommendations [54]. Some very recent catalogues and on-line databases, like that developed by the "Italian National Geophysics and Volcanologic Survey (INGV)" [55], consider ground effects, but they are treated in a descriptive-informative way and are not used for true intensity assessments following the ESI-07 guidelines. As a consequence, currently there is no similar catalogue like that recently published in Spain [10] considering geological and archaeoseismological data extending the earthquake records to the recent geological past.…”