Monday's earthquake in the central region of Abruzzo was in part due to the fact that Italy is getting wider, a French expert said on Tuesday.
''Italy is getting wider by one millimeter a year and this is putting pressure on fault lines along the Apennine mountain chain,'' seismologist Pascal Bernard said in an interview published in the French daily Liberation.
Italy's greatest 'hope', he said, was that along the mountain chain there was not one or two major fault lines but ''a series of faults of no longer than 15km each maximum which are in some way interconnected''.
Bernard explained he used the term 'hope' because ''the magnitude of a quake is directly linked with the length of a fault when it slips. When the faults are longer than 1000km and up to 1,000km their can provoke 'titanic' earthquakes''.
Bernard is employed at the Institute du Physique du Globe in Paris.
