Italy quake: L’Aquila known as seismically active area
The L’Aquila area is a very seismically active part of Italy, and earthquake scientists were not surprised that a magnitude 6.3 temblor occurred there.
In the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology~earthquake/ITALY/forecasting/M5.5+/?RESULTS%3A_forecast_a nalysis)’s ranking of seismic zones in Italy, the area around L’Aquila ranks sixth-most likely to have a large earthquake, said Warner Marzocchi, the institute’s chief scientist. When the country is divided up with 40-mile circles, the cell around L’Aquila ranks second, Marzocchi said.
This is the first major earthquake to occur in the nation since the institute started doing the rankings in 2005, Marzocchi said.
“We are quite satisfied,” Marzocchi said. “It means we are able to understand the area in a quite reasonable way and also make rankings.”
The area is so active because it sits near the boundary where the African plate is sliding under the Eurasian plate, seismologists said. The forces of these two pieces of crust coming together have folded up part of the Earth into the Apennine Mountains that run down the spine of Italy.
Along those mountains, quakes greater than magnitude 6 rumble through the area about every 10 years, said Leonardo “Nano” Seeber, senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University.
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