The Catastrophic Earthquake in Albania has raised Durres by 10 centimeters above sea level

 Durres is elevated 10 centimeters above sea level! The magnitude 6.3 earthquake that hit Albania yesterday brought a massive displacement of the Albanian coast. This is shown by radar images recorded by the Sentinel-1 satellite of the European Space Agency's (ESA), European Copernicus program and analyzed by seismologists at the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has allowed measuring the deformation of the territory as it did for the 2009 earthquakes in Aquila, Italy. The deformation was measured by Geohazard-Tep online platforms developed by ESA, using a copy of the Sentinel-1 satellite radar images taken prior to the earthquake and after the earthquake, to map the earth's displacement.

How it works

This was achieved thanks to the electromagnetic signal received from the satellite, the reflection of the surface of the Earth captured by the sensors, which is represented in the image obtained in different color cycles, each cycle represents a displacement of the earth's surface during the first line from the satellite to the half of the wavelength of the signal released.