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Monday, December 28, 1908 was not a good day. Even before people in southern Italy went to church to pray on the "Day of the Innocents," they fell victim to one of Europe's greatest natural disasters. At 5:21 a.m., a magnitude 7.5 earthquake shook the strait between Italy and Sicily. Large areas in Messina, at the eastern end of Sicily, and in Reggio Calabria, at the tip of Italy's boot, were razed. The number of deaths could never be precisely determined; the figures vary between 60,000 and more than 100,000 victims.
On December 29th, the first telegrams were sent via agencies to the local editorial offices. The Wiener Zeitung reported on the “local Imperial Maritime Observatory” in Trieste. The devices there had registered a "violent near-earthquake that began at 5 a.m. 22 minutes 7 seconds, reached the maximum amplitude of 50 millimeters at 5 a.m. 25 minutes 58 seconds and ended at 6 a.m. 29 minutes 7 seconds." So much for the measured facts. The epicenter was thought to be 600 kilometers away, "probably in the Balkans".
The first short reports from Italy on December 28th were still quite vague. An earthquake was reported from Rome that was felt in several cities in Sicily. Palermo reported: "It is rumored that the earthquake in Messina caused very serious damage." (Wiener Zeitung, December 29, 1908). Only gradually did the terrible news spread about numerous collapsed structures and sunken ships. The lines of communication were broken. "The telegraphic and telephone connections with Messina have been interrupted," reported the Wiener Zeitung on the first day after the quake.
For the evening paper of the Neue Freie Presse on December 29th, expert opinions, “expert reports” in the spelling of the time, were obtained. First Professor Eduard Suess (1831 to 1914) had his say. At that time, Suess was president (1898 to 1911) of the Academy of Sciences; he had retired as a university professor of geology since his farewell lecture in 1901. Thanks to his major work (1875) on earthquakes in southern Italy, he was an expert on the subject. Through his three-volume work "The Face of the Earth" (1883 to 1909) he became the authority in geology. In his 1875 paper he summarized that earthquakes occur frequently at points and lines that "usually coincide with detectable fault lines or tectonic dividing lines in the mountains." He cites subsidence that occurred along an "arc-shaped fault line that runs from the Catanzaro area, south of Messina, to the Aetna and further west" as the cause of the current Messina earthquake.
Expert number two, Professor Viktor Uhlig (1857 to 1911), a student of Suess and his successor as full professor at the University of Vienna, confirms his teacher. Uhlig speaks of a tectonic earthquake ("certainly very likely") and once again points to the expected aftershocks with lower intensity.
The next day, a third expert, the young geophysicist Victor Conrad (1876 to 1962), had his say in the morning paper of the Neue Freie Presse on December 30th. Since 1904 he was head of the earthquake service at the k. k. Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics at Hohe Warte 38 in Vienna Döbling (today: Geosphere Austria). A vertical seismograph from Spindler & Hoyer in operation. In 1907, Conrad personally ordered the measuring device in Göttingen.
On December 28, 1908, the seismograph passed its baptism of fire; the maximum deflections were among the largest of those measured to date. In the newspaper report (p. 10), Conrad analyzes the seismogram in detail and confirms the "shock line" mentioned by Suess the day before. For Vienna, where the measuring device struck at exactly 5 a.m. 22 minutes and 54 seconds on December 28th, he calculated a vertical offset of one millimeter for the seven-second vibrations of the ground. He “probably” assumed the Strait of Messina to be the source of the earthquake. Once again he emphasized the impossibility of "predicting such natural events, even in the shortest possible time." A fact that has not changed in the 21st century.
The newspaper line at that time, the Neuer Freie Presse (founded in 1864) or the Wiener Zeitung (founded in 1703), did not include any images in the reporting; they relied on timely information. However, the Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung, founded in 1899, was different. It courted its readers with full-page drawings and striking headlines on the front page and skilfully addressed their emotional side, but could not keep up in terms of topicality.
Their cover from December 30th mentions an "earthquake disaster in Italy. Thousands dead." The large-format picture, a train wreck, shows no reference to the earthquake. On December 31st, the newspaper seemed to want to catch up, with the headline: "150,000 dead in earthquake catastrophe." The drawing with a dead person, desperate survivors, destroyed houses and flooded streets impressively underlines the plight in southern Italy. Inside the sheet there are pages of reports and numerous drawings that illustrate all facets of human suffering. Even at the beginning of the year, death with an hourglass, surrounded by a field of rubble and desperate people, does not announce a good 1909 ("New Year's turn under death and ruin").
The earthquake disaster dominated the cover of the Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung until mid-January. In addition to horror reports, positive news was also communicated. On Sunday, January 17, 1909 one read: "19 days under the rubble of Messina". Like a miracle, nine-year-old Franceso Minissale was found alive on Friday, January 15th. He and his two sisters, aged 12 and 20, survived in the basement of a house with onions, water, oil and wine. Popular good news as a counterpoint to the terrible news in the tabloids. News about local help was and is always well received. That was the headline of the January 14th issue with a full-page picture showing members of the Vienna Rescue Society handing out food to survivors. "The Vienna Rescue Society in Sicily. The first evacuation of the refugees from Messina." The last sentence suggests that the Viennese were the first to distribute food here, which is of course not true.
Immediately after the accident, photographers set out to document the destruction. Mass-produced postcards were sent worldwide, and today they still dominate the postcard offerings when querying for “Messina” from relevant dealers. The images of horror were sent all over the world by eyewitness reports. One of the numerous cards went to Bonn: "Warm greetings from Sicily. [...] Messina is a terrible sight, a huge field of rubble from which around 100 dead people are still being recovered every day." – these lines get under your skin even after more than 100 years.
The Russian Alexei Maximowitsch Peshkov, commonly known as the writer Maxim Gorki (1868 to 1936), who was in Capri at the time, paints a similar picture. He was nearby, rushed over, saw the images of destruction and recorded them in the book (together with Dr. M. Wilhelm Meyer) "In the Destroyed Messina" (Berlin, 1909). "The earth rumbled and groaned dully, it bent and bent underfoot and formed deep crevices - as if a huge giant worm that had been slumbering since time immemorial had awakened down there." The forces of nature had brought terrible suffering, "the city was destroyed, and under its rubble thousands of hopes and thousands of thoughts were buried forever."
The American volcanologist Frank Alvord Perret (1867 to 1943) was among the first to study the earthquake scientifically. He was already on site on December 31st. In a report in the American Journal of Science (April 1909) he writes of several earthquakes (November 5, December 10 and December 27) leading up to the catastrophe. He mentions their tectonic nature, but emphasizes the connection with magmatic intrusions. He sees the cause of Calabrian earthquakes in movements of deep-seated magma.
The earthquake was followed by a tsunami. Its tidal wave, up to three meters high, first reached Messina ("two or three minutes after the shock") and then ("in 115 minutes") also reached the coast of Malta. Perret also mentions submarine mass movements (“downslip of loose material into deep water”).
An international research group led by Irena Schulten from Malta published details about this in April 2023. The huge submarine mass movement in the Ionian Sea, already postulated by Perret, rushed down like an avalanche at around 6 meters per second. Ten hours after the quake was registered, over 140 meters thick sediment masses, or turbidites in technical terms, destroyed the telegraph cable in two places that ran more than 3,000 meters deep on the seabed between Malta and the Greek island of Zakynthos.
In May 2021, a research group led by Giovanni Barreca from Catania (Italy) wrote an extensive paper on the cause of the quake. In addition to a bulging of the continental plate in the area of the Peloritan Mountains in northeast Sicily, the experts cite a subsidence in the Strait of Messina as the most important cause of the earthquake. In connection with this is a previously unknown 34.5 km long fault line. This tectonic structure, combined with shifts in the seabed, is currently considered to be the cause of the earthquake.
If you compare the very first expert reports from 1908 and 1909 with the extensive studies of the 21st century, some of which were based on large measurement campaigns, Suess, Uhlig and Perret had already recognized fundamental things. (Thomas Hofmann, Christa Hammerl, December 28, 2023)