September 15, 1976: Fifty years ago, Friuli shook once again

On September 15, 1976, just over four months after the May 6 earthquake, Friuli was hit by two new, extremely powerful shocks. The first occurred at 5:15 AM and the second at 11:21 AM, both with magnitudes around 6.0. The tremors claimed more lives and further exacerbated the damage in a region that had already been severely devastated.

However, the story of the Friuli earthquake is also the story of the scientific community's response. In December 1976, just a few months after the earthquake, the Bollettino di Geofisica Teorica e Applicata (BGTA) - the OGS scientific journal - published two full issues dedicated to the event: Volume 19, Part 1 and Part 2. It was a massive scientific endeavor completed very rapidly with contributions from both Italian and international researchers. These publications document the observations, studies, and initial scientific interpretations of a seismic sequence that profoundly impacted the Friuli region.

The volumes contain the proceedings of the conference organized on December 5, 1976, in Udine by OGS, the University of Trieste, the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Extraordinary Government Commission in Friuli, the National Research Council (CNR), the International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM) in Udine, and the European Association for Earthquake Engineering (EAEE).

Today, those two volumes have been digitized and are once again accessible online, available to anyone studying the 1976 earthquake or wishing to learn about the history of scientific research that followed the event.

The work carried out by the editorial team of the journal - now called Bulletin of Geophysics and Oceanography (BGO) and published as an open-access journal - bears witness to the key role played by OGS (then the Experimental Geophysical Observatory of Trieste) in studying the earthquake. The Observatory played a vital role in locating the main events of the sequence and was a primary contributor to the scientific collaboration network established after the tragic events of 1976.

Today, the Seismic Network of Northeastern Italy (SMINO) represents a transnational research infrastructure managed by OGS. It supports scientific research and civil protection activities through an integrated system of instrumental networks featuring real-time data acquisition and transmission, which complement the national network.