Reply to Comment on “The Prediction of Two Large Earthquakes in Greece”

Abstract

We welcome the critical comments of Papadopoulos [2010]. We must point out, however, that most of them are incorrect.First, on 1 February 2008, P. A. Varotsos et al. (Seismic electric signals and 1/f “noise” in natural time, version 3, 2008; available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.3766v3) did document the seismic electric signal (SES) activity for the M 6—class earthquake, recorded at station PIR (one of the SES measuring stations located close to Pirgos city in western Greece) on 14 January 2008, and assigned the epicentral area (approximately 250 × 250 kilometers). Two weeks after the documentation, the Mw 6.9 Greek earthquake in question occurred, on 14 February 2008. As to the occurrence time of this earthquake, the newspaper Ethnos on 10 February 2008 (http://www.ethnos.gr/article.asp?catid=11424&subid2&tag=8777&pubid=444473) reported it as “imminent.” Second, we did not mention two relatively small Patras shocks on 4 February 2008 simply because VAN also documented them (P. A. Varotsos et al., 2008, version 3) based on separate SES activity recorded on 10 January 2008 at Patras.