Agadir Near One Of Biggest Fault Lines

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29146, 5 March 1960, Page 13

Agadir Near One Of Biggest Fault Lines

PARIS, March 4.

The ancient city of Agadir,” shattered by an earthquake earlier this week, is near one of the earth’s major fault lines, where earthquake disasters have occurred for at least two centuries.

The crack in the earth’s shell runs through the northern tip of Morocco, the toe of Italy, through Greece and Turkey and on across Persia, French scientists told the American Associated Press. Agadir is about 300 miles south of this line. Lisbon, where an earthquake in 1755 killed 60,000, is a little farther to the north of the fault. Closer are Orleansville, Algeria, where 1400 died in an earthquake in 1954, and Messina, Italy, the scene of a 1908 earthquake which killed 75,000. Vast rock shifts in the area of the earth’s fault lines are responsible for some of the earthquakes. Other causes are the caving in of sub-surface earth pockets and volcanic eruptions. The director of the International

Bureau of Seismology, Professor Jean Rothe, of Strasbourg, believes that the Agadir earthquake was due to a giant shifting of earth and rock.

Agadir is on a coastal plain between two mountain ranges, the Grand Atlas and the Anti-Atlas. The Grand Atlas range is in the process of a “readjustment,” in which the various rock layers making up the mountains are shifting position. It is this phenomenon which apparently caused the earthquake. The shifting of the rock layers set up a shock wave which moved through the earth’s crust, leaving destruction in its wake.