page_title: Seismic risk in Malta
section_title: Tectonics
hierarchical_section_title: Seismic risk in Malta / Tectonics
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Carte des plaques de la Mer Egée et anatolienneEnglish: Map of the Aegean Sea and Anatolian Plates
context_page_description: Seismic risk in Malta is considered to be low with little historic damage noted and no known victims. The archipelago is however in a potentially significant seismic zone and the risk to the population is probably undervalued.
context_section_description: The Maltese archipelago rests on an underwater plateau, a relatively stable part of the African plate. The islands are situated around 200 km to the south of the subduction fault between the African plates and the Eurasian plates. The pelagic plate forms a shallow platform separating the Ionian basin from the Western Mediterranean basin, situated roughly under the Sicilian Channel. The plate is crossed by a rift zone formed of three grabens: the Pantelleria graben, that of Malta, and that of Linosa. These grabens are linked by a system of North-South orientation faults (sometimes West-East) with dextral cavities that are responsible for most of the earthquakes that can affect the archipelago.
  The islands themselves are made up of limestone rocks from the Oligocene and Miocene geological epochs, belonging to the Cenozoic era.
caption: Map of tectonic plates in the eastern Mediterranean
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