Abstract
Combining historical accounts and seismological studies, three hundred years of dormant information emerged as a source of the largest known seismic event that rocked Brazil since the beginning of our colonization. The probable epicenter location of the 1690 tremor lies on the left bank of the Amazon River, about 45 km downstream from the modern day Manaus. A year later, while passing this area, a missionary met witnesses of the tremor and observed remarkable changes in the topography and vegetation along the margin of the river. By 1692 another priest confirmed this event and the occurrence of large waves in the river, which led to the flooding of the Native Indians' terrains. The tremor spread seismic waves throughout the forest and shook indigenous constructions as far as one thousand kilometers away. A calculation of the seismic parameters shows an estimated magnitude of 7, a maximum intensity of IX MM and a felt area of about 2 million km2. Due to the long recurrence period for this type of tremor, the discovery of one of these events is valuable for seismic global intraplate studies. As for Brazil, it unravels the myth that the country was never hit by severe earthquakes.
Highlights
The primary information of this unusual earthquake with epicenter in the state of Amazonas came from two Jesuit missionaries of the Society of Jesus, fathers Fritz (1880) and Betendorf (1909) who, at different times and independently, collected eyewitness accounts from people that felt and observed effects of the tremor that occurred in June 1690.The geographer Sternberg (1950, 1953) was the first to reveal data on the severity of the earthquake: "If Father Fritz’s chronicle is true the occurrence in 1690 would have been a real mega earthquake, a disastrous or catastrophic quake”
Three decades after Sternberg’s (1950, 1953) publications, researches of the University of Brasília (Veloso and Mendiguren 1980) reviewed the information on historical Amazon earthquakes and added new instrumental data, including the one obtained by five seismographic stations, which had been installed by Eletronorte (Centrais Elétricas do Norte do Brasil) - in 1997 the Amazon region was upgraded with the first portable digital recorders and broadband sensors (Veloso 1997)
The area where the tremor was felt encompassed by the IVMM intensity was represented by an elongated ellipse, with its major axis closely matching with the main axis of the Amazon Basin (Fig. 4), which presents the approximate felt area of the 1955 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Brazil, of with the field investigation to obtain seismic intensity data was conducted 31 years later (Assumpção and Veloso 1987)
Summary
The primary information of this unusual earthquake with epicenter in the state of Amazonas came from two Jesuit missionaries of the Society of Jesus, fathers Fritz (1880) and Betendorf (1909) who, at different times and independently, collected eyewitness accounts from people that felt and observed effects of the tremor that occurred in June 1690.The geographer Sternberg (1950, 1953) was the first to reveal data on the severity of the earthquake: "If Father Fritz’s chronicle is true the occurrence in 1690 would have been a real mega earthquake, a disastrous or catastrophic quake”. The primary information of this unusual earthquake with epicenter in the state of Amazonas came from two Jesuit missionaries of the Society of Jesus, fathers Fritz (1880) and Betendorf (1909) who, at different times and independently, collected eyewitness accounts from people that felt and observed effects of the tremor that occurred in June 1690.
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