The chance of a major earthquake hitting in the Aegean sea at present is “remote”, professor Emmanuel Scordilis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki said on Saturday.
Speaking to the Cyprus News Agency, he said the time which has passed since the 1956 earthquake which hit the island of Amorgos, which measured 7.7 on the Richter scale, is “not enough for the area to have loaded with enough stress so as to cause such a major earthquake”.
Smaller earthquakes have been occurring in Greece’s Cyclades islands since the beginning of the month, with a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in the tourist hotspot island of Santorini the strongest so far.
Scordilis said an earthquake measuring around six on the Richter scale is possible, though given that the strength of an earthquake doubles with each number on the Richter scale, this would be less than half as powerful as the 1956 earthquake.
“I have completed some measurements which show that from the earthquakes which have occurred since the end of January in the Cyclades region, energy seems to have been released, the sum of which corresponds to that of an earthquake measuring no more than six on the Richter scale, which is the maximum that this particular fault could release,” he said.
He added, “this is another element which leads to the assessment that the possibility of a major earthquake is not there”.
Asked if the seismic activity in the Cyclades can impact Cyprus and the wider region, he said that if a fault has loaded stresses and can cause a major earthquake, it can be impacted by the “slightest mobility”.
However, he said, it is not easy for experts to know the conditions of any fault line in advance.
He then said Cyprus “could only be affected in the event of an earthquake of an intensity comparable to that of 1956, which I do not consider particularly likely”.
The largest earthquake to be felt in Cyprus in recent memory was that which struck southeastern Turkey on February 6, 2023.
While no buildings collapsed on the island, it was decided in the north that a number of school buildings were unfit for use due to their risk of collapse in a possible earthquake, and as such, schools across the north have been operating out of portacabins for almost two years.
Turkish Cypriot opposition party ‘MP’ Filiz Besim said on December last year that only 19 schools have been renovated and made safe since the earthquake, despite plans to renovate a total of 127.
The slow pace of renovations caused Cyprus Turkish teachers’ trade union (Ktos) leader Burak Mavis to say ahead of the start of this academic year that “portacabin classrooms cannot be our destiny”.
“Portacabins have ceased to be a means to an end and have been turned into an end goal. They have even been placed in schools where the buildings are structurally sound but that are overcrowded,” he said.
He had added that the north’s earthquake committee had not yet received earthquake safety reports regarding a total of 66 schools, while 58 schools’ cases have now been discussed.
More tragically, a total of 49 Cypriots who were in Turkey at the time of the earthquake died, including 24 members of the Famagusta Turk Maarif Koleji (TMK) school volleyball team and 11 accompanying adults, who had travelled to the city of Adiyaman to take part in a volleyball tournament.
They were remembered at ceremonies marking the second anniversary of the earthquakes on Thursday, with usen Karakaya, whose daughter Selin was among those killed, saying that while two years have passed, “for us, time stopped on the morning of that dark day”.
