The great Adriatic flood of 21 June 1978 revisited: an overview of the reports

Abstract

This paper describes an extraordinary tsunami-like event that occurred on 21 June 1978 that encompassed the middle and south Adriatic Sea. The flood had its culmination in Vela Luka, where a maximum wave height of 6 m was reported. This paper contains a detailed description of the event as seen by eyewitnesses, its outreach along both the eastern and western coasts, and the aftermath and recovery activities in Vela Luka. All available records have been collected and analysed to detect the source and the generating mechanism of the long ocean waves. Seismic generation is fully excluded from the consideration, while a submarine landslide seems rather unrealistic as it does not explain the characteristics of the measured ocean waves. Therefore, the source of the event was presumably in the atmosphere, where a travelling disturbance was detected that had the capability to resonantly transfer energy to the ocean via the Proudman resonance mechanism. Although these data prove the proposed mechanism, the final confirmation for such a scenario should come from a process-oriented numerical modelling study.