The island of Crete, in Greece, in the Mediterranean Sea. (Credit: Screenshot/Google Maps.)
A powerful earthquake of magnitude 6.1 struck Greece at sea, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) reports a magnitude 6.3 earthquake hit the island of Crete, Greece, at a depth of 83 km.
The tremor was also felt in neighboring countries, as far as Lebanon, Egypt and Syria.
The epicenter of this earthquake is located at sea 15 kilometers from the Greek island of Kasos and was also strongly felt on the islands of Kos, Rhodes, in the Dodecanese archipelago, as well as in Crete, according to the Greek news agency ANA and the public television channel ERT. However, it caused neither casualties nor damage, according to the same source, but a tsunami risk alert message was sent to the mobile phones of residents of Rhodes, the islands of Karpathos and Kasos.
Geodynamic Institute of the Athens Observatory, a reference in Greece for measuring earthquakes, announced a magnitude 5.9 earthquake more than 420 km southeast of Athens. The earthquake occurred at a depth of 78 kilometers around 01:51 local time (22:51 GMT Tuesday), according to the USGS.
The president of the Seismic Planning and Protection Organization (OASP), Efthymios Lekkas, was however reassuring on Wednesday morning. "I consider that this earthquake will not be followed by a strong sequence of aftershocks, nor can it be considered as a precursor to a larger earthquake," he assured on the ERT channel, highlighting the significant depth of this earthquake. "There will be neither a pre-seismic nor post-seismic sequence," according to him. He also believed that this quake had nothing to do with the repeated ones recorded during the winter on the Greek island of Santorini, in the Cyclades archipelago.
The epicenter of the earthquake is located about a hundred kilometers from the coast of Santorini. The region of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, a major Greek tourist spot, experienced exceptional seismic activity in January and February with thousands of tremors that caused thousands of residents to flee, who have since returned home.
Located on several geological faults in the southeast Mediterranean, Greece is regularly affected by earthquakes.
The last deadly earthquake in the archipelago occurred in October 2020 on the island of Samos, in the Aegean, between Greece and Turkey. With a magnitude of 7, this seismic shake caused two deaths in Samos and more than 100 in Izmir, the Turkish port city.