426 BC Malian Gulf tsunami

The earthquake in the Gulf of Euboea 426 BC devastated in the summer of 426 BC, the coast of the Gulf of Malia and the Northern Gulf of Evia in Greece. The earthquake triggered a tsunami, coasts and cities flooded. The intensity of the earthquake is estimated from the historical tradition of damage descriptions to XI after the MSK scale.

The event was to explore the Greek historian Thucydides occasion, the cause of the tidal wave. He came to the conclusion that an earthquake would have caused the tsunami. Thucydides was the first scientist who put the quake and the wave in a cause - effect relationship. His predecessor Herodotus had the tsunami of Potidea still attributed to the vengeance of Poseidon.

Historical records

The earthquake in the Gulf of Evia is one of a series of earthquakes in the summer of 426 BC, which forced the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, cancel the invasion of Attica. The geographer Strabo reported that parts of the Greek islands flooded, cities were devastated and rivers have changed their course permanently. The tsunami hit the coast in the Gulf of Maliakos in three places, reaching even cities that were three quarters of a mile from the sea. The tsunami hit on with such force that a trireme was lifted out of its dock and thrown over the city wall.

Thucydides left a report in which he stated that two of the characteristic features of a tsunami, namely the rapid fall in sea level and the actual wave:

" About the time of the earthquake pulled the sea in Orobiai in Euboea from his usual coastline back, came back as a huge wave and flooded a large part of the city, so now is the sea, which was once the country, as well as the townspeople were killed, who could not save themselves in time to higher ground. A similar flood occurred in Atalanta, the island off the opuntisch - Locrian coast, where parts of an Athenian attachment were washed away and one was destroyed by two drawn on the beach ships. Also Peparethos of the sea drew back a little, but without a subsequent flood, an earthquake, however, brought a certain part of the city wall, the city hall and several other buildings to collapse. "

He concluded:

"In my opinion, must be seen as the cause of this phenomenon in the earthquake. At the point where his tremors were most violent, the sea withdrew to return suddenly with a multiplied force. This causes the flooding. I do not understand how such a disaster without the earthquake could happen. "

Scientific workup

While the epicenter of the quake so far could not be determined, comes as rather a fundamental crustal movement along the faults in the Gulf of Euboea in question as a series of undersea landslides. The movements on the faults associated with the plate- tectonic processes in the Ionian Sea, where the African plate is subducted beneath the Anatolian block, a part of the Eurasian plate to the northeast.

Inconsistencies in the descriptions of Strabo and Thucydides prompted scientists of the Institute of Geodynamics at the National Observatory of Athens and the Institute of Geology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to text compare and attraction of archaeological findings on the assumption that it is the of under the name of earthquake could have acted 426 BC known earthquake to two different earthquakes.