Geohazards assessment and mapping of some Balkan countries

The assessment of geological hazard is a topic with significant interest for the Balkans. During the last decade of twentieth century, most of the countries in the region have embarked on the road of a hasty transitory period from totalitarian regimes to democracy. Development of free market economy has given rise to uncontrolled movement of people, fast construction of housing and facilities and unproportioned accumulation of population around and in big cities. Besides Greece, an old member of European Union, and two newcomers in the organization, Romania and Bulgaria, the other countries are all hoping to enter the Union as faster as they can. Many different candidate or full-fledged member country programs of European Community offer a lot of joint and cross-border projects for constructing road infrastructure and facilities. As development accelerates in the Balkans and given the intensive geohazard elements that this territory exhibits, it becomes increasingly important to understand, study, and map these elements for being aware of the damage to the total environment these hazards might cause. The geohazard map and assessment of some Balkan countries has been carried out through two scientific meetings in Ohrid, Macedonia, and Tirana, Albania during 2007. The map is compiled in the Albanian Geological Survey, Tirana, Albania in the scale 1:1,000,000. As a base map, we used the topographic map produced by VGI, formerly Yugoslavia mapping authorities. As a seismic layer in our map, we used the values of peak ground acceleration obtained from Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program. Two catalogs were constructed: The first one that contains the crustal earthquakes (hypocentral depth within first 70 km) and the second one that contains intermediate earthquakes (hypocentral depth below 70 km). This work is largely based on previous studies and investigations by earth scientists and specialists of each country comprised in this territory. In this respect, the map we constructed should be considered as a preliminary composite geohazard map with the possibility to be enriched and added with other new elements and data in the future.