## 2 Materials and Methods  
### Study Area and EQ Data  
Here, the area of interest was the eastern Mediterranean, see Figure 1. We used the United States National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) PDE catalog--the data available from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), cf. [127]--in the region \(\rm N_{235}^{52}E_{5}^{50}\), and considered all EQs recorded during the period of almost 45 years from November 1976 to February 2021 with \(\rm M_{thres}=3.8\). The eastern Mediterranean Sea and its surrounding coastal areas of Greece and western Turkey are one of the most seismically active and rapidly deformed regions on the continents [128]. This area is tectonically dominated by the relative plate motions between Eurasia and African lithosphere plates and their microplates. The African plate moves north to Eurasia from Gibraltar to the east. The plate boundary crosses North Africa and continues into southern Sicily, continuing around the Adriatic through Italy and eastern Balkans to Albania and northwestern Greece. There is a suggestion that the Adriatic is part of the African plate forming a small plate calledApulia [129]. The Apulia plate has a continental structure, e.g., it has a similar mean density to the density of the Eurasian plate, and their interaction leads to a continental collision. This microplate is suggested to rotate counter clockwise and its interaction with Eurasia is responsible for the shallow EQs in the region of Croatia, Albania and northwestern Greece. East of Apulia, the rapid movement of two small plates, the Aegean and the Turkish, takes up the relative movement between the Eurasia and African plates. The Aegean plate consists of the Aegean Sea, part of the Greek peninsula, Crete, and part of the western area of Asia Minor, while the Turkish part includes most of Asia Minor and Cyprus. The collision between Arabia and Eurasia in the Caucasus and eastern Turkey forces the Turkish plate to move westward in relation to Eurasia. Due to this movement, the strain accumulates along the North Anatolian transform fault (e.g., the opposite sides of this fault belong to different plates that move horizontally on top of each other) that accommodates large destructive EQs. The northern front of the African plate, south of the Adriatic Sea, forms the eastern Mediterranean oceanic lithosphere. As this oceanic lithosphere has a higher density than the continental lithosphere of the Aegean plate, it sinks below it, with an average angle of 38\({}^{\circ}\), and forms the Hellenic Arc (SW of Cefallonia to S. Peloponnese, S. Crete up to S. Rhodes) and is associated with a sharp crustal shortening and an uplift rate of a few mm/yr along the Hellenic Arc due to the accretion of sediments of the African plate below the overriding Aegean plate [130]. Most of the subduction movement is accommodated along the Hellenic arc causing shallow depth EQs at its outer part. The seismically active regions of western Turkey, eastern and northern Greece, and the northern Aegean Sea are dominated by extension forces such as the southern Aegean Sea move in an almost southwesterly direction relative to Eurasia. This extension is thought to be driven principally by the \"roll-back\" of the subducting slab below the southern Aegean, as it sinks into the mantle [131]. The geophysical properties are different in the Aegean Sea from those in the outer part of the Hellenic arc. Another geotectonic feature causing destructive EQs is the significant right-lateral strike-slip movement along the North Aegean trough, and the Cephalonia-Lefkada transform zone, which is due to the offset between the oceanic-continental convergence to the west and the westward propagation of the Anatolian plate to the east. The combination of all the above factors leads to a significant left-lateral movement along the southeastern front of the Aegean-African interface [130]. Figure 1: Map of the area N\({}_{23}^{52}\)E\({}_{5}^{50}\) together with the plate boundaries (blue) according to [PERSON] [132].