From written records to seismic parameters: the case of the 6 April 1667 Dalmatia earthquake

Abstract

On Wednesday 6 April 1667, an earthquake occurred, and severely affected a large area of the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, also known as southern Dalmatia, in today Croatia, and part of Montenegro. This paper summarizes the seismological data existing today on this large earthquake, with special attention to how such data were gathered by means of investigating hitherto not considered historical sources of earthquake records. The obtained set of 37 macroseismic intensities in European Macroseismic Scale-EMS98 was processed, to obtain an epicentre located not far from the most damaged places, amongst them Ragusa (today Dubrovnik), and an Mw value of 6.4 ± 0.3.