In the past, from antiquity to the Renaissance, earthquakes were phenomena shrouded in mystery and interpreted through the lens of religious, mythological and philosophical beliefs: they were attributed to the wrath of the gods or to mysterious animals, such as the famous giant catfish ‘Namazu’ from Japanese folklore.
In the 18th century, advances in the natural sciences and the earthquake that devastated Lisbon (1755) began to radically alter the outlook.
However, it was the earthquake of 16 December 1857 that struck the Kingdom of Naples and Robert Mallet’s scientific expedition that changed the history of seismology forever.
The Irish engineer and geologist set off from England, thanks to a grant from the Royal Society of London, arrived in Naples and travelled through the areas affected by the earthquake with the aim of testing his theories on earthquakes and laying the foundations for the project he was working on: the creation of the world’s first seismic map.
During his journey, Mallet tested for the first time a method for locating the hypocentre of an earthquake and the trajectory of the seismic wave.
His observations were published in 1862 in the report ‘The Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology’, in which he laid the foundations for the formulation of a scientific discipline that he himself called ‘seismology’ and anticipated the theory of plate tectonics by a century.
