Descriptive catalogues of historical earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean and the middle east; revisited

Abstract

I met Jean Vogt in London about 35 years ago; there and then, it became clear that there was an affinity between us. He was an indefatigable protester of the system in which science works today, and the fact that he always called a spade a spade, often did not endear him to others. His profession was his hobby and he did not depend on others in his work. Jean had an absurd sense of humour. He would encapsulate his impression about earthquake cataloguers concisely and succinctly. There were cataloguers, he said, who padded their work, others who “went through open doors” in their research, and those whose assessment of historical data was made ad absurdum. Shortly after the excellent book by Alexandre was published in 1990 (Alexandre, 1990) which showed that 70% of the earthquakes between 394 and 1259 in Western European countries reported in national catalogues were either spurious, or doublets, Jean suggested that we do the same depoillement of the more important catalogues for Europe. However, our project didn’t go very far. Far enough however to allow us to derive the “Alexandre coefficient” for three of the most authoritative European catalogues which had a coefficient greater than 30%. What follows is a potpourri of observations and conclusions drawn from my own experience with the study of historical earthquakes in which Jean played an important role in formulating and that came into fruition in some of our papers.