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 Italian life as afternoon siesta and morning coffee.
Why is this happening?
Permanent shaking provides 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 destructive earthquakes in Italy.
Apennines - a mountain range that runs through most regions of the country. It is she who is the result of the activity of the European and African tectonic plates. Unlike other mountain systems, the Apennines are quite young in the geological aspect. And, byforecasts of specialized experts, will provide the Italians with many more similar incidents. This is confirmed by the earthquake that occurred in Amatrice.
Shake-up 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 with a small magnitude, which occurred around midnight on August 24, 2016, destroyed a large part of the city. Dozens of Italians died and hundreds were injured. By and large, the infrastructure of the settlement ceased to exist. The victims were placed in gyms, schools and other public places.
According to experts, the earthquake that occurred in Amatrice came from an 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 Amatrice, an earthquake could 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 goes into billions of dollars:
- Indian Ocean - earthquake in December 2004. Its magnitude is up to 9.3 on the Richter scale. The earthquake center was located near the island of Sumatra. ATas a result, according to various estimates, up to 280 thousand people died. A fifteen-meter tsunami completely destroyed the infrastructure of the coast!
- Armenia - disaster in 1988. The record force of pushes is 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 number of those killed in the disaster was relatively small - twenty-five thousand, then half a million people lost their roof over their heads. Where is Amatrix! An earthquake of this magnitude would have reduced ancient Rome to a huge pile of rubble.
- 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 bed of the Wei River, turned the surrounding areas literally into a deserted desert! In total, almost a million people died from this almost biblical disaster!
Amatrice after the earthquake will recover in a couple of years, and disasters of this magnitude of the state heal for centuries.
What happens next?
Most likely, in the next few years we will see many more events similar to the earthquake in Amatrice. Italy is an earthquake-prone area. And to count on the fact that geological processes will stop at one moment is at least naive. But it is also not worth falling into panic moods - most of the tremors recorded on the Apennine Peninsula are within the "green zone". Their strength rarely exceeds 3points.
