The AMORGOS research project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), began in January 2025 and will run for 5 years. The project is led by Frédérique Leclerc, associate professor at the French Géoazur laboratory.

Main objectives :

• Establish plausible scéanrios describing the seismic rupture of the 1956 Amorgos earthquake (M7.7), as well as the tsunami generated, the largest tsunami in the Mediterranean for two centuries;
• Estimating changes in regional stress since 1956;
• Assessing the impact on large regional faults that have not ruptured;
• Reduce the vulnerability of threatened urban areas.

AMORGOS is a research project aimed at improving knowledge of telluric orginine risks in the Hellenic arc, based on the Amrogos earthquake which occurred in 1956 near the island of the same name.

This earthquake is still poorly understood today, due to the lack of a dense network of simological stations in the region in 1956. The fault responsible for the 1956 rupture was identified very recently, following two oceanographic missions involving the ship “L'Europe”, in 2022 and 2023, missions co-piloted by the ENS Geology Laboratory and the Géoazur laboratory.

After analysis of videos taken by the IdefX autonomous submarine (2022) and the Ariane underwater rover (2023), the culprit was identified: the Amorgos submarine fault.

The results of the 2022 and 2023 oceanographic missions are presented in the publication by Leclerc et al. (2024), available for download (click here).

The precise scenario of the rupture remains undetermined. And understanding it is important for understanding the state of loading of the surrounding faults. This is the challenge taken up by the scientists involved in this project.