Known and unknown earthquakes through some European periodicals of the eighteenth century

Abstract

Since the eighteenth century, pioneer seismologists have used information from the periodical press to compile their lists of European earthquakes. A systematic reading of three eighteenth century periodicals –Gaceta de Madrid (1701–1750), Gazeta de Lisboa (1715–1751) and Mercure de France (1732–1763) – has been carried out in the frame of the EC project ‘Review of Historical Seismicity in Europe (RHISE)’. The retrieval of earthquake records provides data on European and Mediterranean earthquakes. Sources and records are here analysed to verify their reliability and to understand the significance of the earthquake information they supply. Special attention has been paid to earthquakes that affected Italian territory, by means of a comparison between records and space-time, intensity parameters of the Italian seismic catalogue: this comparison shows that about 45% of the earthquakes mentioned by the periodicals are unknown in the Italian catalogue, and that 30% of them are damaging earthquakes.