The researchers of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing department (CEG) have found no indications of any build-up of tensions along the fault lines.
So is another earthquake, like the one in Roermond in 1992, which had a magnitude of 5.8 on the Richter scale, excluded then?
“I don’t make predictions”, Hanssen says. “Least of all after the recent conviction of seismological scientists in Italy.”
Hanssen and Caro Cuenca, who used a technique called radar interferometry, established that the Earth has moved an average of one millimetre a year over the past twenty years. However, they believe that this movement can be more plausibly explained as a result of variations in groundwater levels along both sides of the fault line, rather than by shifts in the tectonic plates.
Caro Cuenca has been awarded his PhD for research on this topic last month.
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