365 Crete earthquake facts
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The impact of a catastrophic earthquake and mega-tsunami on July 21, 365 CE devastated Peloponnesus, the Greek Islands, Sicily, Cyprus, Libya, Palestine and Egypt.
Recent geological studies view the AD 365 Crete earthquake in connection with a clustering of major seismic activity in the Eastern Mediterranean between the fourth and sixth century AD which may have reflected a reactivation of all major plate boundaries in the region.
To the east of Crete along the Hellenic Arc, strike-slip tectonics with some extension become important.
The distribution of uplift, combined with observations of present-day seismicity, suggest that this earthquake occurred not on the subduction interface beneath Crete, but on a fault dipping at about 30° within the overriding plate. The wall of water was high enough and powerful enough that it carried ships and hurled them up to two miles inlandThe earthquake and tsunami were described by many writers of the period. The 365 Crete earthquake occurred at about sunrise on 21 July 365 in the Eastern Mediterranean, with an assumed epicentre near Crete. There was no equivalent to Pliny the Younger’s description of the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD. In one gigantic push from below, coral reefs surrounding Crete erupted 33 feet upwards, clear of the water, and geologists estimate that the island was itself lifted by as much as 30 feet.In addition to the immediate damage resulting from the earthquake, the tremors caused a powerful tsunami that wrecked not only much of the Cretan coast, but raced across the Mediterranean, wreaking havoc across that sea.
He points to ancient shorelines higher up the cliffs in Crete that show the island had lifted little over the past 125,000 years, except for during the 365 event. Geologists today estimate the undersea earthquake to have been a magnitude eight or higher, causing widespread destruction in central and southern Greece, northern Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, Sicily and Spain. However, the quality of literary writing and intellectual discourse had significantly declined – the days of the high quality prose of a Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar or Livy, were centuries past by then. Writers of Late Antiquity tended to describe events without paying as much attention to the details and actually describing them, as much as they did to ascribing their occurrence to divine displeasure and intervention from up above in response to political and religious events on earth.Between that literary decline and religious antagonisms giving rise to intellectually dishonest descriptions, such as attributing the Cretan disaster to heavenly wrath, most of what we know is derived from archeological evidence, combined with numerous references to the earthquake’s occurrence and its massiveness.The historian Ammianus Marcellinus’ described the impact on Alexandria: “Such descriptions however were rare, and the historical records lacks a reliable contemporary narrative describing the damage elsewhere in the Mediterranean with the degree of attention that was common when Greco-Roman civilization and culture were at their height.
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