Abstract
In the last forty years, Malta has only experienced a few occasional tremors from local or regional earthquakes, with only some being reported briefly in the local newspapers. These reports gave limited qualitative and quantitative information about the shaking experience felt across the islands. The Seismic Monitoring and Research Unit at the University of Malta has put in place a ‘Did you feel an earthquake?’ online questionnaire in order to start gathering information from locally felt earthquake related shaking. On Easter Sunday 24th of April 2011 windows rattled, doors shook open, and furniture shifted in many homes across Malta when a series of earthquakes occurred 38 km off the eastern coast. In total, the SMRU located 15 earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from M L 1.8 to 4.1 over a period of 4 days. A total of 489 felt reports were submitted through the online questionnaire. The compilation of the data is a first of its kind for the Maltese islands. Here we present a summary of the reports following the main shock. A maximum intensity value IV on the European Macroseismic Scale was assigned. No structural damage was reported. The data reflects the demographics as well as the different types of buildings found across the archipelago.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Alex Bezzina for insightful comments that helped us to improve the manuscript. We are grateful to Carlos Cañas Sanz for his help in generating the demographic local maps. Some figures were created using the Generic Mapping Tools (Wessel and Smith 1998) and ObsPy: A Python Toolbox for Seismology (Beyreuther et al. 2010). This study was supported by SIMIT Project part-financed by the European Union, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Italia-Malta Cross-Border Cooperation Programme, 2007–2013.
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Agius, M.R., D’Amico, S., Galea, P. (2016). The Easter Sunday 2011 Earthquake Swarm Offshore Malta: Analysis on Felt Reports. In: D'Amico, S. (eds) Earthquakes and Their Impact on Society. Springer Natural Hazards. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21753-6_27
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