EGU2020-22189
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22189
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The 2019Durrës, Albania earthquake sequence – preliminary results from a post-seismic campaign

Edmond Dushi1, Bernd Schurr2, Ehsan Kosari2, Hugo Soto2, Olgert Gjuzi1, Alicia Rohnacher3, Christian Haberland2, Andreas Rietbrock3, Frederik Tilmann2,4, Mark Handy4, Rexhep Koci1, Kamil Ustaszewski5, Torsten Dahm2, Thomas Meier6, and Llambro Duni1
Edmond Dushi et al.
  • 1Institute of Geosciences, Energy, Water and Environment (IGEWE), Seismology, Tirane, Albania (edmonddushi@yahoo.com)
  • 2Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum – GFZ, Potsdam, Germany
  • 3Geophysical Institute, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
  • 4Institute of Geological Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
  • 5Institut für Geowissenschaften, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
  • 6Institut für Geowissenschaften, Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel

On 26th of November 2019 an Mw 6.4 earthquake ruptured near the port town of Durrës, only 25 km from Tirana, the capital of Albania. It caused major damage and killed 51 people, making it the deadliest earthquake in 2019 worldwide.

The earthquake occurred on the eastern Adriatic margin, where the Adriatic micro-plate collides with Eurasia causing widespread distributed deformation and crustal shortening that built the peri-Adriatic orogenic belts. Convergence is accommodated in the external Dinarides/Albanides by thrust faulting, mostlyalong E-dipping low-angle detachments with subordinate W-dipping back-thrusts in the most external thrust belt segment. The deformation front, particularly along the southeastern Adriatic coast, is seismically highly active, manifested not only by this most recent event, but also, e.g., by one of the largest instrumentally recorded earthquakes in Europe, the 1979 M7.1 Montenegro event slightly further north and a number of disastrous historic earthquakes.

The 2019 Durrës mainshock was apparently relatively deep (~25 km) and of thrust type. It was preceded by significant foreshock activity starting in September 2019 with two Mw 5.6 and 5.1 earthquakes a few kilometres south of the mainshock that also had a thrust mechanism, however with nodal planes differing from the mainshock, indicating that these occurred on a different fault.

Approximately two weeks after the mainshock, we installed a 30-station short-period seismic network to densely cover the epicentral area. We will present a preliminary analysis of the mainshock and its aftershock sequencehopefully elucidating the fault network responsible for the earthquake sequence.

How to cite: Dushi, E., Schurr, B., Kosari, E., Soto, H., Gjuzi, O., Rohnacher, A., Haberland, C., Rietbrock, A., Tilmann, F., Handy, M., Koci, R., Ustaszewski, K., Dahm, T., Meier, T., and Duni, L.: The 2019Durrës, Albania earthquake sequence – preliminary results from a post-seismic campaign, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22189, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22189, 2020.