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Multiple Tremors Near Greek Island of Santorini Shut Schools and Put Residents on Edge

Ruins of a settlement, including a former Catholic monastery, lie on the rocky promontory of Skaros on the Greek island of Santorini, Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (AP)
Ruins of a settlement, including a former Catholic monastery, lie on the rocky promontory of Skaros on the Greek island of Santorini, Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (AP)
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Multiple Tremors Near Greek Island of Santorini Shut Schools and Put Residents on Edge

Ruins of a settlement, including a former Catholic monastery, lie on the rocky promontory of Skaros on the Greek island of Santorini, Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (AP)
Ruins of a settlement, including a former Catholic monastery, lie on the rocky promontory of Skaros on the Greek island of Santorini, Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (AP)

A series of earthquakes near the Greek island of Santorini have led authorities to shut down schools, dispatch rescue teams with sniffer dogs and send instructions to residents including a request to drain their swimming pools.

Even though earthquake experts say the more than 200 tremors that have hit the area since early Friday are not related to the volcano in Santorini, which once produced one of the biggest eruptions in human history, locals are on edge.

The strongest earthquake recorded was magnitude 4.6 at 3:55 p.m. Sunday, at a depth of 14 kilometers (9 miles), the Athens Geodynamic institute said. A few tremors of over magnitude 4 and dozens of magnitude 3 have followed. There were no reports of damage or casualties.

Earthquake experts and officials from the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection and the fire service have been meeting daily and decided to close schools Monday on the island of Santorini as well as nearby Amorgos, Anafi and Ios.

After Sunday's meeting, they also advised residents and hotel owners in Santorini to drain their swimming pools over concerns that large volumes of water could destabilize buildings in case of a strong quake.

Another meeting was scheduled Sunday evening at the prime minister’s office with the chief of Greece’s armed forces and other officials.

The fire service sent a contingent of rescuers including a sniffer dog on Saturday, and dispatched more forces Sunday, as a precaution. The rescuers have pitched tents in open fields.

Island residents have been advised to avoid large open-air events and to move about the islands mindful of rockfalls. All four islands have steep cliffs and, in the case of Santorini, a large part on the main town is built on a cliffside.

Experts said it was impossible to predict whether the seismic activity could lead to a stronger tremor, but added that the area could potentially produce a 6 magnitude quake.

Mild earthquakes have also been recorded in Santorini’s volcano caldera, which is mostly undersea, since September. The strongest one with magnitude 3.8 occurred on Jan. 25. Since then, seismic activity inside the volcano has subsided, experts say.

The Santorini volcano eruption at about 1600 B.C. devastated the island, buried a town, and caused massive earthquakes and flooding that impacted the island of Crete and as far as Egypt. Experts estimate that up to 41.3 cubic kilometers (9.8 cubic miles) of rocks were ejected and 9-meter (29-foot) tsunamis hit Crete.

In the 1990s, the Santorini volcano was designated one of 16 volcanoes around the world that need to monitored because of past massive eruptions and proximity to dense population areas.

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Varieties

Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
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Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)

Climate change is already causing all sorts of problems on Earth, but soon it will be making a mess in orbit around the planet too, a new study finds.

MIT researchers calculated that as global warming caused by burning of coal, oil, gas continues it may reduce the available space for satellites in low Earth orbit by anywhere from one-third to 82% by the end of the century, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed. That's because space will become more littered with debris as climate change lessens nature's way of cleaning it up.

Part of the greenhouse effect that warms the air near Earth's surface also cools the upper parts of the atmosphere where space starts and satellites zip around in low orbit. That cooling also makes the upper atmosphere less dense, which reduces the drag on the millions of pieces of human-made debris and satellites.

That drag pulls space junk down to Earth, burning up on the way. But a cooler and less dense upper atmosphere means less space cleaning itself. That means that space gets more crowded, according to a study in Monday's journal Nature Sustainability.

“We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. There’s no other way to remove debris,” said study lead author Will Parker, an astrodynamics researcher at MIT. “It’s trash. It’s garbage. And there are millions of pieces of it.”

Circling Earth are millions of pieces of debris about one-ninth of an inch (3 millimeters) and larger — the width of two stacked pennies — and those collide with the energy of a bullet. There are tens of thousands of plum-sized pieces of space junk that hit with the power of a crashing bus, according to The Aerospace Corporation, which monitors orbital debris. That junk includes results of old space crashes and parts of rockets with most of it too small to be tracked.

There are 11,905 satellites circling Earth — 7,356 in low orbit — according to the tracking website Orbiting Now. Satellites are critical for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and monitoring environmental and national security issues.

“There used to be this mantra that space is big. And so we can we can sort of not necessarily be good stewards of the environment because the environment is basically unlimited,” Parker said.

But a 2009 crash of two satellites created thousands of pieces of space junk. Also NASA measurements are showing measurable the reduction of drag, so scientists now realize that that “the climate change component is really important,” Parker said.

The density at 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth is decreasing by about 2% a decade and is likely to get intensify as society pumps more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, said Ingrid Cnossen, a space weather scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who was not part of the research.

Cnossen said in an email that the new study makes “perfect sense” and is why scientists have to be aware of climate change's orbital effects “so that appropriate measures can be taken to ensure its long-term sustainability.”