2nd Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 2CroCEE

The overall objective of the project “Investigation of seismically vulnerable areas in Croatia and seismic ground motion assessment” – CRONOS – is to make Croatian society more resilient to the impact of destructive earthquakes. The aim of the CRONOS project, funded by Norwegian Financial Mechanism, is to facilitate this through the development and modernization of seismic hazard assessment in Croatia and stimulate the development of seismic risk reduction policies through scientific infrastructure and capacity building, knowledge transfer and international research cooperation.

The first step towards the presented goal is to analyse and understand the past seismicity of the given area. Therefore, for the chosen area (42.5 – 44.5 °N, 14.75° – 17.75 °E) an earthquake catalogue CEC-Cronos has been prepared. The chosen area includes the wider area of central and southern Croatian coastal area (Dalmatia) – one of the seismically most prone areas in Croatia. The given catalogue contains almost 48000 earthquakes which occurred between the years 306 and 2020. Those earthquakes, magnitudes up to 6.7 and intensity in the epicentre up to IX °MSK, have been statistically processed and will be presented.

Croatia is characterized by a moderate-to-high level of seismicity, highest in its northwestern and coastal parts. More than 145.000 earthquakes from the period before Christ till the end of 2020 are contained in the Croatian Earthquake Catalogue (CEC). There were more than 100 stronger earthquakes, whose computed or estimated magnitudes were more than 5. The majority of the earthquakes on Croatian territory are the result of the strain accumulation caused by the rotation of the Adria microplate towards the Eurasian tectonic plate. Additionally, central Croatia is in a contact zone of three big geological units: The Alps, the Dinarides (or The Dinaric Alps), and the Pannonian Basin.