Chronicle of a predicted earthquake

details

Production
2002, France
Original language
French
Running time
00:51:00
Genre
documentary
Topic
geology
Directed by
Gilles Sevastos
Produced by
Agat films & Cie / Ex-nihilo, Aune Productions, ARTE, France 5
Member page
Agat Films & Cie / Ex Nihilo

Greece, like the West Coast of the United States, Japan or the West Indies, is situated in one of the most earthquake-prone regions of the world. There is a major earthquake here every ten years or so. The last was in 1995. In only 15 seconds, the little town of Aigion, on the south bank of the Corinthian Gulf was devastated.

Faced with this type of catastrophe, the same question always comes up: can we predict an earthquake? Not yet, say scientists, but in the future…Pascal Bernard, seismologist at the Paris Institute of the Physique of the Globe (IPGP) has been working for 8 years on the warning signs that precede an earthquake. And for 5 years, we have been following his fieldwork. This involves observing the Earth's crust by installing increasingly efficient machines to constantly check the mechanisms of seismic fault lines.