The True Case of the 1276 Fake Earthquake

Abstract

In the pre-1900 time-window of earthquake catalogs, it is not unusual to come face-to-face with “fake ” earthquakes errone-ously listed among true ones. Such mistakes have been disclosed for many events, and their nature revealed and discussed in quite a number of papers in the last thirty years. Some discover-ies of fake earthquakes originated from the revision of national catalogs (e.g., for France, Vogt 1979; for Italy, Guidoboni and Ferrari 1986 and Bellettati et al. 1993; for Germany, see a sum-mary in Grünthal 2004), and others come from projects deal-ing with European-wide catalogs (e.g., Stucchi and Camassi 1997). As a consequence of these investigations, in some well-studied European regions recent catalogs have been purged of most of these mistakes. A list of fake earthquakes is now avail-able in some regional databases (France: BRGM-EDF-IRSN/