The Seismicity of Central Greece in the Late 19Th – Early 20Th Century as Engraved on Various Historical Buildings

Abstract eng:
Design of historical structures is based on the earthquake macroseismic intensities expected to occur at the broader area to be erected. For the engineers, critical parameter is usually the peak ground acceleration of the earthquake, expected to affect the structure during a time period representing the real life time of the structure. When the structure is a historical monument, this period is projected to the past. As reliable instrumental measurements of earthquake parameters exist only for the 20th century and the life time of a monument goes much behind this limit, for the estimation of the characteristics of the past earthquakes, the use of historical sources recording these earthquakes or their damage is of primary importance. In these sources, descriptions, when discovered, may allow the estimation of the appropriate macroseismic parameters of past earthquakes and lead to integrated information on the area considered. By extrapolating this information, one can also get, on a probabilistic basis, an idea on expected future earthquake activity. In this paper, this methodology is presented in terms of a forward-inverse problem: historical earthquakes of the area of central Greece during the second half of the 19th century are investigated and macroseismic historical earthquake data are evaluated with respect to specific monumental buildings of the area. Inversely, these monuments may also act as servers of new, yet undiscovered information on earthquake effects, which would lead to an improved picture of the historical seismicity of Central Greece.

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