The resizing of the most powerful Italian instrumental earthquake (September 8, 1905, Calabria region, southern Italy)

Abstract

The 8 September 1905 Calabria earthquake is the seismic event for which the Italian Seismic Catalogue shows the highest instrumental magnitude of the whole dataset. However, the reported MS = 7.47 was calculated over only two stations, and leaves room for a revision. In this work I provide a new estimate of the surface-wave magnitude of the earthquake calculated over sixteen individual values of magnitude from seven different stations. The new estimate is MS = 7.10 ± 0.21, a value that is consistently lined up with other estimates provided by means of macroseismic or geological evidence. The novel estimate is stable despite alternative epicentral locations and different depths proposed for this event by several investigators. The net variation of almost half a unit magnitude implies a resizing of the seismogenic source of the event in the frame of the seismotectonics of the region, and highlights the strong need for a systematic revision of the instrumental magnitude estimates for several ‘historical’ earthquakes that occurred at the dawning of the instrumental seismology.