Rome: The earthquakes that have buffeted central Italy over the last two months could continue in a devastating domino effect with one large quake leading to another along the central Apennine fault system, a leading seismologist warned on Sunday.
An earthquake measuring 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey struck on Sunday in the same region where a 6.2 quake on August 24 killed 297 people. In between there have been thousands of smaller tremors, including a 6.1 quake on Wednesday.
Gianluca Valensise, a seismologist at Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, told Reuters there was a "geodynamic link" between the deadly August earthquake and all those that have followed.
Italy's Apennine mountains that run from the Liguria region in the northwest to the southern island of Sicily are dominated by a chain of faults in the earth's crust, each one averaging about 10-20 kilometres in length.
"This process can continue indefinitely, with one big quake weakening a sister fault in a domino process that can cover hundreds of kilometres, in principle," Valensise said.
Valensise said Italy had seen something resembling the sequence of earthquakes in Calabria, in Italy's southern toe, in 1783 when there were five major quakes measuring 6.5 or larger in less than two months.
More recently, there were three quakes around Assisi in central Italy in 1997, the first one measuring 6.4 which killed 11 people, another the following day, and another around 20 days later with many smaller ones in between.
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