Seismicity and Seismotectonic of North Africa: An Updated Review

The North Africa region extends from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West, including five countries: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. The earthquake record demonstrates that this region suffers from earthquakes with considerable level of hazard due to the complex convergent plate boundary along the African continental plate near to the comparative movements of tectonic microplates from the Mediterranean Sea in the North and the Red Sea in the East. Additionally, the inland tectonic activities induce local seismic sources inside the African plate in its North African segment. Furthermore, local site effects, vulnerability of the built environment, and the dramatic increase of concentration of population within hazardous areas, alongside the nature of the sociocultural in North Africa in respect to natural disasters, all these factors can significantly increase the damage posed by earthquakes in this region. Several researchers studied the seismicity of North Africa and gained valuable results; however, their studies commonly focused on a particular region or subject. Therefore, the authors of this article are hopeful to introduce a piece of simple and informative material to the reader about the region of North Africa by compiling earthquake data from several sources and by a systematic literature review. In this chapter, the reader can find information about location, seismotectonic setting, seismic sources, and historical and instrumental earthquakes with a brief description of the devastating events, earthquake recording history, and seismic networks of each country in North Africa.