10:34 PM
Thursday, January 26, 2023
(Masrawy):
Dr. Abbas Sharaki, a water and geology expert at Cairo University, said that an earthquake measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale at a depth of 10 km before dawn today, January 26, 2023, at 1:38 a.m. Cairo time, struck northern Ethiopia, about 500 km from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and the center of The earthquake in the African Rift Zone.
And he added in a post on the social networking site “Facebook”: “Another earthquake, slightly stronger, 4.8, at a depth of 10 km, also struck the Djibouti coast in the same range as the Great African Rift this afternoon at 3:05 pm Cairo time, and it is 800 km from the Renaissance Dam.”
He explained, “A month ago, on December 26, 2022, two earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.5 and 4.6 on the Richter occurred in northern Ethiopia, on the border with Eritrea, at the end of the Afar Triangle in the African Rift in Ethiopia.”
He continued: “The African Rift region is the most vulnerable African region to earthquakes and volcanoes because of the Great Fault, which is the largest fault on land in the globe, and the white circles in the attached map constitute centers of earthquakes during the past 100 years. The diameter of the circle represents the strength of the earthquake on the Richter scale.”
The water expert said: “The seismic waves spread in all directions from the epicenter in the form of circular waves, and the deeper the earthquake, the more it spreads on the horizontal level, and it is expected that such earthquakes will affect the Renaissance Dam in the future, especially when it fills the lake, as the water additional weight on the Earth’s surface.
He concluded: “The greatest danger from the Renaissance Dam is not in the multiple storages, as much as the danger of its huge storage capacity of about 74 billion m3 in a geologically and climatically unstable environment. The impact is devastating on Sudan and perhaps Egypt in case of collapse.”
