Evaluation of Tsunami Hazard in Calabria and Eastern Sicily, Italy

Abstract

Assessment of tsunami hazard is a fundamental element of natural hazards evaluation and should be routinely performed for all coastal areas known to be exposed to tsunami attacks. Italy has been invested by tsunamis, mostly generated by local earthquakes with focal region close to the coasts. In previous preliminary investigations by the author the most hazardous Italian area was shown to be that embracing eastern Sicily and Calabria in South Italy. This paper addresses again the problem of the tsunami hazard evaluation in this region: previous calculations are improved, since new estimates are computed by considering a more complete basic data set, by using a slightly more sophisticated statistical approach and by introducing some account for the efficiency of the tsunami generation mechanism in the evaluation procedure. It is confirmed that this region has a substantial potential of being hit by local tsunamis: the zone with the highest expected rate is shown to be the Messina Straits, i.e. the narrow channel separating Calabria from Sicily, where the greatest event ever occurred in the whole region was observed, following the 28 December 1908 Messina earthquake.KeywordsTsunami HazardTsunami GenerationThreshold MagnitudeSeismic CatalogTsunamigenic EarthquakeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.