Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1 Introduction
The study of historical seismicity in France was developed step by step over the last
250 years. It began just after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, when several worldwide
catalogues were published, in Germany first and in France soon after. Later in the
XIX century, five major projects were developed, each initiative building on those
preceding. The earliest began in 1841 with the first of the well known regional and
annual catalogues of Alexis Perrey until 1872, and it was continued by the global
catalogue of Fernand de Montessus de Ballore completed by 1907. Between 1908
and 1920, the
Bureau Central de Meteorologie
in Paris (BCM) established a system-
atic investigation of French contemporary earthquakes. The seismological service
was transferred in 1921 to the
Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg
(IPGS),
where Edmond Rothe and his son Jean-Pierre Rothe continued to conduct macro-
seismic enquiries of contemporary events. They compiled the so-called “Rothe cat-
alogue” of French historical seismicity, based largely on Perrey's and Montessus de
Ballore's work. The most recent period, from 1975 on, began with the
Projet de la
Carte Sismotectonique de la France
in relation to the French nuclear power plants
programme. Eventually, this project gave birth to an associated database, Sirene,
partly published now on the Internet under the name SisFrance (SisFrance 2008).
Considering the huge amount of data collected in the framework of the
Pro-
jet Sismotectonique
, one might doubt the potential for further fruitful research in
French historical seismicity. However, since his retirement in 1984, Jean Vogt pur-
sued intensive archive research in France and elsewhere culminating in a consider-
able number of discoveries: new earthquakes, identification of “false” earthquakes,
revision of macroseismic analysis of some major earthquakes, etc. His new results
were published in more than 200 notes and articles.
In this paper, we will recall the history of catalogues describing historical earth-
quakes in France. We will introduce some new results in the French Alps and
describe the new techniques that could be valuable in investigating the historical
seismicity.
2 A Brief History of Catalogues
Along history, countless earthquakes catalogues were already compiled and pub-
lished worldwide. Some were nothing else than compilations of previous catalogues,
while other, more valuable, searched topics and periodicals for new information, or
even found original sources in manuscripts or local newspapers. Catalogues may
be classified on the one hand as global and regional, on the other as annual usually
compiled in quasi real time from primary sources. Analyses and discussions of some
major catalogues for Western Europe may be consulted (see Alexandre 1990; Vogt
1993; Vogt 2003). For France, over a hundred local and regional catalogues are
listed in (Lambert and Levret-Albaret 1996), and a comparable number for Germany
in (Gr unthal 2004). For Italy, a history of catalogues has been established by
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