Gerassimos A. Papadopoulos

The 2026 Sergey Soloviev Medal is awarded to Gerassimos A. Papadopoulos for promoting innovative research on geohazards that led to a new tsunami intensity scale, improving the analysis of foreshock seismic sequences and for the development of tsunami warning systems.

Gerassimos A. Papadopoulos, has promoted research on geohazards in several world areas, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, following the footsteps of Sergey Soloviev, in particular in the field of seismology and tsunami sciences.

In seismology, he contributed to the study of foreshock sequences in several seismogenic regions and improved the understanding of the patterns of accelerating seismicity towards the main seismic shocks. He established new empirical relationships between earthquake magnitude and the distance to the sites where hazardous events like soil liquefaction and landslides may occur. He served as Deputy President of the European Advisory Evaluation Committee for Earthquake Prediction (Council of Europe).

To better constrain tsunami hazards, in 2001, in collaboration with F. Imamura, he introduced a 12-grade tsunami intensity scale that improved significantly our ability to measure the size of tsunamis and finds large applications around the globe. He contributed to the first European Tsunami Project funded by EU in 1992 and was one of the founders of the 'North-Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Tsunami Warning System of UNESCO'. He contributed to the establishment of the Hellenic National Tsunami Warning Centre in Greece and was the Research Director of the Centre for several years. In 2016 he published a comprehensive monograph on the tsunamis in Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. In 2021, he was awarded the Hamaguchi Award for his significant contribution to the enhancement of coastal resilience against tsunamis.