September the 30th, 2021 - The 2020 Zagreb earthquake was a horrendous experience for all who experienced it. I was one of them. It was difficult to believe that, amid the very light snow which had just started to fall, the car alarms sounding, pieces of neglected facades falling and a global pandemic, that what was going on was real.
It seemed somewhat Biblical. Anyone who has experienced a strong earthquake and the horrifying, deafening sound they produce has no desire to ever live through anything similar again. As such, it is difficult to measure the trauma residents of Petrinja, Glina and other areas of Central Croatia continue to experience following the tragic natural disaster at the end of December last year.
Emotions aside, Zagreb is no stranger to earthquakes and many small ones which are barely felt, if at all, occur throughout the year. They also occur along the faultline near Sisak-Moslavina. Was the 2020 Zagreb earthquake the strongest the city has experienced in the last 140 years? With terrible ones occuring previously, that answer has finally come.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, the scientific journal Geophysics looked into the 2020 Zagreb earthquake and offered an answer to that question. ''We recently published the first article that is part of our special issue dedicated to the 2020 Zagreb earthquake series that began with an earthquake of local magnitude 5.5 on March the 23rd, 2020,'' it reads.
This article offers an answer to a question that was very topical in the first days after the 2020 Zagreb earthquake struck, resulting in billions in damages: Which earthquake was stronger - the one from 1905, 1906 or the one from 2020?
Professors Marijan and Davorka Herak and colleagues Mladen Zivcic from the Slovenian ARSO searched the archives, excavated old seismograms, compared, analysed and calculated a lot, and concluded that the earthquakes of 1906 and 2020 can be considered approximately equal in magnitude to ML = 5.3, but that this one from 2020 caused a stronger shake.
The earthquake of 1905 is definitely weaker than these two were. Feel free to take a look at the original article,'' it reads, and that article can be read in full here.
