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Antonio Aretxabala, Geologist, University of Navarra, Spain

El Hierro's third chance

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 08:12:09 +0000 Published in ABC (and group Vocento)

Nearly six hundred earthquakes in three days, of which more than thirty exceed magnitude 3 on the Richter scale, have been detected at a depth of about twenty kilometers. Once again the island of El Hierro enters in yellow risk of prealert according to the PEVOLCA. The magmatic pressure pushes and seems to give no respite; it has made the most seismically monitored area of our geography swells about three or four centimeters at the rate of a strong earthquake every eight hours.

Again, and there are no two without three, the sword of Damocles and many scientific, technical and tourist opportunities looms over the island. The director of the IGN in the Canary Islands, María José Blanco, has stated that it is likely that in the coming days there will be more earthquakes, and that they will increase in intensity and magnitude. The source of so much pressure is located with its anomalous seismic activity at a depth of twenty kilometers and is restricted to a area of about three kilometers around El Julan.

What has left both geologists and volcanologists and scholars of the peculiar telluric process, which began more than a year ago in El Hierro, speechless, is that this time, the seismic development has been very accelerated; the previous one that caused the submarine eruption of the Mar de las Calmas for three months, had a horizontal deformation that reached five centimeters, in this new process, only in three days, has been three to four centimeters.

We should not be mistaken thinking in a reactivation of the previous one, in which that tenth Canary Island that even had a name in the social networks did not emerge in that sea, now it is another independent process. The previous one has not yet concluded. We are reassured that the area of El Julan is practically uninhabited.

Alpidio Armas, president of the Cabildo of El Hierro is confident that "this new process does not have a negative impact on the Economics of the island" and has order the population to remain calm, it is localized and has no implications for the inhabitants. He has order that is report seriously, "there are many implications for society and affects their Economics and their way of life".

Already in the previous crisis, El Hierro gave a lesson in management, we learned many lessons, not only scientific or geological; in terms of organization, the flow of Internal Communications and to the outside was exemplary, as now. For the first time we saw European children, practicing a seismic pedagogy, a culture that saves lives. In several European tourism fairs such as Madrid, London or Berlin, the manager of tourism, Veronica Montero, presented a whole scientific tourism offer related to the phenomenon, gave its result especially in Germany, also updated, supported by applications for smartphones, live monitoring via internet, sadly without explicit institutional support as it is given to initiatives that promote gambling and other vices. The first sketches of the study of animal behavior in the face of shaking coincided with the publication by NASA of a study of the behavior of toads days before the earthquake in L'Aquila.

We encourage our leaders to support with all their might these sustainable, exemplary scientific, cultural and tourist initiatives with a guaranteed future projection. A source of wealth that counts on the material, immaterial and human heritage that transmutes an original natural status into an investment whose fruits will indeed be prestigious and seductive. If the French, and I die of envy when I say it, have been able to make a 3D scientific film full of beauty, ethics and pedagogy as "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" showing their love for their land, why don't we exalt and elevate our nature to those levels? The human being is allowed to be part of the creation with the art in the look, our perspective is creative, the French are not better than us, they have just put themselves to it.