Earthquake in the Piotrków Trybunalski area. Geologists point to a tectonic graben

• On Monday, June 16, an earthquake occurred in the area of ​​Piotrków Trybunalski, which was supposed to have a force of 2.9 on the Richter scale - informs BiznesAlert.pl.
• The tectonic graben is a young structure and therefore still active, while the excavation of the Bełchatów open pit involved the removal of several million cubic meters of overburden, from which a gigantic heap was created above the flat surface of the terrain.
• The earthquakes occurring there are related to the destabilization of the active fault system forming the above-mentioned Bełchatów Graben, which was classified by the State Mining Authority in Katowice as a result of mining and drainage works.

On Monday, June 16 , an earthquake occurred in the Piotrków Trybunalski area, which was supposed to have a magnitude of 2.9 on the Richter scale . Poland is considered a country free from earthquakes, but in selected regions it is considered pensesmic, i.e. with low seismic activity, where earthquakes do occur, but rarely and with low intensity.

Monday's earthquake in the area of ​​Piotrków Trybunalski is related to the latitudinal Bełchatów graben , on the extension of which the epicenter of this phenomenon is located - reports BiznesAlert.pl.

Historically, along the same tectonic graben in the open pits in Bełchatów and Szczerców , earthquakes nearly twice as strong were recorded, which had never occurred before the construction of the mine .

The current earthquakes in the Piotrków Trybunalski area are associated with the tectonic graben and the Bełchatów open pit. As reported by BiznesAlert.pl, the Bełchatów tectonic graben is a 2 km narrow depression with a length of approx. 15 km in a latitudinal direction. On the map, the direction of this tectonic graben has a clear extension to the earthquake site in the Piotrków Trybunalski area. In the context of geological age, this is a young structure and for this reason still active . In turn, the Bełchatów open pit excavation with a final depth of 250 - 300 m involved the extraction of several million cubic meters of overburden. Outside this excavation , a gigantic dump was created, several dozen meters high above the flat surface of the terrain . The same technology of depositing overburden was used for the second part of this deposit in the same tectonic graben, known as Szczerców. Once again, as before, an excavation was carried out and the overburden masses, numbering in the millions of tons, were stored as close as possible to a safe distance from it.

Earthquakes occurring in the Bełchatów graben are related to the destabilization of the active fault system that creates the aforementioned Bełchatów graben. This destabilization was rightly classified by the State Mining Office in Katowice as a result of mining and drainage works . It was noticed that where there had been relative balance for the last few million years, millions of tons of earth and water were removed from one wing of the active fault and stored on the other wing. In this way, a double state of imbalance was created, as reported by BiznesAlert.pl.

The still active fault began to react. The first earthquake occurred in the eighties of the last century . It was so strong that tea glasses fell off the table in the mine and posters fell off the wall . It is estimated that it was a 4.5 magnitude quake. Thirty years later, the same story repeated itself after the formation of the overburden, but in a different place on the Szczerców deposit. Its strength was so great that buildings, ceilings and walls cracked in the area. It had a magnitude of 4.7 on the Richter scale. Similar to Bełchatów, the stresses equalized and earthquakes repeated themselves on a much smaller scale.

Since the earthquake in Pieniny in 1200 described by Jan Długosz, Poland has been hit by 13 strong earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 5 on the Richter scale over the last 825 years . Statistically, strong tremors occur in Poland every 65 years , but from 1992 to the present there have been four strong earthquakes. In 2004, a strong earthquake occurred in Poland twice.