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The 3 December 1828 moderate earthquake at the border between Belgium and Germany

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Abstract

On 3 December 1828 at half past six in the evening, the border region between Belgium and Germany was stricken by a moderate earthquake. Up to now, the available information on this event has been essentially provided by a few contemporaneous scientific studies. To better evaluate its impact, location and magnitude, we have searched for new original historical reports. We collected 57 additional witness testimonies, which complete those previously collected about the earthquake effects. Among the testimonies, we also retrieved a questionnaire sent by the Prussian government to local authorities with the purpose of quickly obtaining information on the earthquake effects in the western part of the kingdom of Prussia. This inquiry is the oldest of its kind that has been discovered to date in this part of Europe, suggesting a rare concern by a national authority about the seismic hazard, and prefiguring the seismic inquiries that scientific institutions use today. The analysis of these new data made it possible to evaluate the intensity in 50 cities out of the 75 where the earthquake was observed. From these intensity data, we determine that the epicentre was in the Hautes-Fagnes region [lat. 50.38°N/long. 6.19°E ± 30 km] where moderate damage, corresponding to EMS-98 intensity VI–VII, was observed. At large distances, the earthquake was felt as far as Düsseldorf to the north, Brussels to the west, Metz to the south and Wiesbaden to the east. These distances correspond to a perceptibility radius of about 150 km. The magnitude of this earthquake is evaluated to be ML = 4.7 (−0.2/+0.5) and MW = 4.2 (+0.4/−0.2).

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank gratefully Prof. Dr. Klaus Hinzen for running its program to estimate location and magnitude from IDPs and Prof. Tonie van Dam for its proofreading and corrections. We thank the editor, Mariano Garcia-Fernandez, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped us to strongly improve the original manuscript. We also thank David Kusman for his contribution to the researches on historical earthquakes at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and Giovanni Rapagnani for his technical support. We also acknowledge BELSPO for his financial support, particularly in the frame of the action 1 project MO/33/010 « Recherche et analyse systématique des sources historiques concernant les tremblements de terre destructeurs de nos régions entre 1350 et 1900 », and of the “Supplementary researchers” budget for Elisabeth Knuts.

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  1. Royal Observatory of Belgium, Avenue Circulaire 3, B-1180, Brussels, Belgium

    Elisabeth Knuts, Thierry Camelbeeck & Pierre Alexandre

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  1. Elisabeth Knuts
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  2. Thierry Camelbeeck
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Correspondence to Elisabeth Knuts.

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Knuts, E., Camelbeeck, T. & Alexandre, P. The 3 December 1828 moderate earthquake at the border between Belgium and Germany. J Seismol 20, 419–437 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-015-9535-7

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