The strong earthquake measuring 4,8 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter 15 kilometers northeast of Starigrad Paklenica, near Zadar in Croatia, which occurred on Tuesday at 18:43 p.m., somewhat surprised Croatian scientists.

Seismologist Iva Dasović from the Andrija Mohorovicic Geophysical Institute at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Zagreb says that such a magnitude is not expected often in that area.

"It's not a seismically very active area, it mainly experiences very weak to weak earthquakes of the type we've been recording for years," Dasovic says.

"There have been no strong earthquakes here so far. This is actually the strongest in that area that we know of. The intensity of the earthquake at the epicenter is estimated at VI degrees on the EMS scale, and it occurred in the area of ​​the Paklenica National Park, somewhere in the northeastern part, towards the very border of the park and towards Libitka."

Its depth was somewhere between 9 and 15 kilometers. "It's always a little tricky to pinpoint because you need nearby stations, and our closest one is about 30 kilometers away," says our seismologist.

The main earthquake was followed by three subsequent aftershocks of lesser magnitude. The Zadar County Center 112 received three reports of damage, including small cracks in the wall of the Church of St. Cosmas and Damian in the Slivnica Gornja neighborhood and a crack in a ground-floor wall of an apartment building in the old town of Zadar.