New paper! Archeoseismology in the Dead Sea Zone.
Ancient Tiberias unveils the traces of an earthquake with associated surface rupture
The ruins of the Roman theater and city gates of Tiberias (Israel, along the western shores of the Sea of Galilee) were over there, firstly dug and studied in the early ’80s, waiting for the eyes of earthquake scientists to whisper their secret. The story of an old, destructive earthquake that caused surface faulting at Tiberias, leaving a trace readily obliterated in the following Centuries.
An international team of scientists, including our PERIGEO staff, and lead by Francesca Ferrario, recognized those old traces in the ruins of the Roman Tiberias and analyzed morphotectonic and geophysical data along the western shores of the Sea of Galilee.
The results, recently published in Tectonics, point to a new surface rupture by a normal fault, probably ascribable to the destructive mid‐eighth century CE earthquake sequence. These events, shook a large sector of the Dead Sea zone but their causative seismogenic structures are still debated.
It took quite a long time to see the results of this research published, confirming the saying that science, like genius, is “1% inspiration and 99% expiration”. It all started in 2015 (!!!), when Francesca, as a post-doc, was firstly host by the Geological Survey of Israel as a visiting scientists to study the area from a paleoseismological and archeoseismological point of view.
Nonetheless, it definitely worth the effort. The municipality of Tiberias, soon after our paper had been published, included our results in its urban planning, bringing scientific outcomes directly to their ultimate scope: a service to society! 😉
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More details and comments on our work can be found here: