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Acoustic emission of the Syracuse Athena temple: timescale invariance from microcracking to earthquakes

We show the results of acoustic-emission (AE) monitoring of the Cathedral of Syracuse in Sicily (Southern Italy), built around the surviving elements of a Doric temple dedicated to Athena from the 5th century BC. We wired up a single pillar of the 2500-year-old cathedral for four months and then compared the AE data with earthquake records, observing a time correlation between the AE bursts and the sequence of nearby earthquakes and a similar scaling for the related magnitude distributions. We found that the distribution of times between events—whether earthquakes or acoustic emissions—fell onto the same curve, over a wide range of timescales and energies, when scaled appropriately. A similar ‘universal scaling law’ has been shown for collections of earthquakes of a range of sizes in different regions, so the new results appear to extend the law to the much smaller energy scales of a single pillar. These pieces of evidence suggest a correlation between the aging process and the local seismic activity, and that more careful monitoring of the cathedral is warranted.