ATHENS – They didn’t say when it would happen – only that it would someday – was the warning from two Greek scientists who looked at the country’s seismic history and said there was the likelihood of an 8.5 earthquake on the Richter scale.

The Feb. 6 earthquake that devastated a part of Turkey and killed 41,000 people there and another 5,000 in Syria was registered at 7.8, the strongest in the region for some 80 years.

Professors Costas Synolakis and Costas Papazakos studied the circumstances of a series of earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria and told Greece’s MEGA TV that Greece could also face strong seismic activity.

They noted that strong earthquakes in Greece occur once every 600 years.

“The last major earthquake in Crete occurred in 1403 and I estimate that such earthquakes occur every 600-800 years. We are already at the threshold of an earthquake of the order of 8.5 points on the Richter scale,” Synolakis said.

Papazakos, a seismology professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki agreed and said that, however, it’s impossible to predict when that could happen, both stressing what they were giving was an early warning to prepare.