Post-earthquake Petrinja, December 2020 Copyright Marc Rowlands

December 30, 2021 – Is the Republic of Croatia experiencing more earthquakes and tremors than before? With the natural disaster that struck Petrinja on December 29, 2020 now a year behind us, seismologist Kresimir Kuk seeks to explain a few things about one of Mother Nature’s most unpredictable and devastating events – earthquakes.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, a year and a day ago, the central Croatian region of Banovina was struck by a devastating earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale with an epicenter just 5 kilometers to the south -west of Petrinja. A year later, the ground is still shaking and Petrinja is still in terrible pain.

“. The stronger the main earthquake, the longer the following series lasts, and it contains earthquakes that are stronger given the strength of the main one, “Kresimir Kuk, a well-known Croatian seismologist, pointed out during a conversation with HRT.

The south coast, in fact the whole of southern Croatia is seismically more threatened than the rest of Croatia, stronger earthquakes are possible there. In a longer period of time there are earthquakes which are also more frequent. There may be earthquakes that strike with an intensity of around 7 on the Richter scale in Dubrovnik, and they have happened in the past, ” Kresimir Kuk added.

“Now they are being watched more in this country, and if you consider a longer period of time, then no, we can’t really say that the global seismic activity on Earth has intensified. There are always times when this activity is more pronounced and when it is weaker, both in this country and everywhere else. The point is that now after these earthquakes, both in Zagreb and Petrinja, earthquakes that are located much further away from us are being reported in the media, ” seismologist Kresimir Kuk explained.

Earthquakes in the rest of the world

Kresimir Kuk noted that recent earthquakes in Japan, where their magnitude is a horrific 8 on the Richter scale, are not at all rare in the region, but these countries also have fully adapted infrastructure, so it usually doesn’t cause much harm to a lot of the people who live there.

“I had the opportunity to speak to the Chilean media after the earthquakes in Croatia, and they were terribly surprised by the horrific consequences of a magnitude 6.2 earthquake,” he said. , adding that earthquakes in places like Chile are much, much stronger, that there are several different parameters, such as the depth of the earth where the earthquake occurs because the epicenter is closer to the surface , and in such cases, the more devastating the earthquake, and a few other geographic factors.

A seismological network here in Croatia is being set up …

We installed the grid as soon as we got it through government intervention, immediately after the series of Petrinja earthquakes. They record a lot of earthquakes, and they record very important data that will be used for decades to come in various scientific disciplines, not just seismology. So far, in the wider region of Petrinja, so in the Banovina region, we have recorded about 1,400 earthquakes of magnitude greater than 2. There have been two earthquakes of magnitude 5, about 17 quakes. of earth with magnitude between 4 and 5, so a huge amount of earthquakes have occurred and a large amount of data has not been processed, ” he explained.

“The soil in the Petrinja region is still very active, it is now starting to calm down, but it is simply a process that lasts and is not uniform,” warned seismologist Kresimir Kuk.

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