The June 29/July 12, 1900 Earthquake in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey, from Evidence in the Russian Empire Periodicals

Abstract—This is our second paper concerning the study of earthquakes in Eastern Anatolia based on the information reported in the periodicals of the Russian Empire. We have made a systematic search of all the available Armenian, Georgian, and Russian language newspapers. This resulted in the first inventory of descriptions of the macroseismic effects from the June 29/July 12, 1900 earthquake, which were observed in 14 populated localities. Using these data, we determined the location of the epicenter and the magnitude of the earthquake. The macroseismic magnitude 5.9 precisely coincides with the instrumental magnitude reported in (Ambraseys and Finkel, 1987), while the epicenter location differs by 25 km. The epicenter location estimated in this work seems to be more reliable because its determination is based only on the original descriptions of the macroseismic effect.