The 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Morocco it occurred along the Atlas mountain range, with a compression movement generated by the push of the African plate towards the European one. «It is an earthquake that is part of the seismicity that characterizes all the Atlas Mountains», said the seismologist Carlo Melettiof theNational Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. The mountains, which separate the Sahara desert from the Atlantic Ocean, were the scene of another earthquake of magnitude 5.8, which occurred in 1960 in Agadir, in southern Morocco, and which caused around 15,000 victims.
“Today’s earthquake occurred on the same axis,” Meletti said again. «The Atlas Mountains are one of the two areas of Morocco with the greatest seismicity. The other is located along the Mediterranean coast, where a devastating earthquake occurred in Fez in 1624″, the seismologist said. The mountain range is characterized by a north-south compression movement. That is to say that to the south lies the African plate, the so-called “stable Africa”, «a continent that moves almost like a single object» and whose push towards the north interacts with the European plate and generated the Atlas chain , with a compressive movement.