A tide gauge will be installed on Santorini next week, tsunami and natural disaster expert Costas Synolakis said on Friday, following Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' visit to the earthquake-shaken island.
Synolakis said the tide gauge that measuring changes in sea level should have been installed on the island 20 or 30 years ago. "We are on Santorini. It is not possible that it does not have a tide gauge. It is something that is needed. A space is being prepared now, and I will come next week to install it," he said.
The professor added that this is a long-term problem of Greek islands. "In Greece, there are very few tide gauges. This is true for both Greece and the entire Mediterranean. We need tide gauges exactly so we may measure and know that in case something happens, even on a very small scale, we will have a much more targeted warning. The way things are now, if something happens, we must inevitably evacuate the entire Aegean - inevitably," he said.
Synolakis said that preparing for the worst is the right policy, but that does not mean expecting the worst to happen. "We hope that we are not going to see such a thing. The preparation here is impressive. At a 0 to 10 scale of preparation, we are doing the right thing. At expecting the worst that could happen, from a scale of 0 to 10, we are at 7, let's say," he added. Asked what he fears most, Synolakis said, panic was the greatest danger.
Asked whether there is an expectation of a new crater at the nearby active volcano Kolumbo, he said that would take tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years for that to happen. "I just said that the [seismic] activity may occur because magma material is moving. That does not mean a crater will be formed tomorrow or in six months. This means that our descendants in ten thousand years may see a new crater in this location," he explained.
When he was asked whether an earthquake measuring 6 points on the Richter scale is possible, Synolakis said he could not provide numbers because these are revised according to seismic activity. "That does not mean, however, that something like 1956 will occur," he underlined, referring to the deadly earthquake on Santorini and Amorgos that registered over 7 on the Richter scale.