AI Reveals What Was Behind Those Santorini Earthquakes in Early 2025

In early 2025, the Greek island of Santorini was rocked by a swarm of seismic activity, an event that led to school closures and the evacuation of thousands of residents.

Now, scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to determine what exactly triggered this period of upheaval. The result: the team has been able to analyze approximately 25,000 earthquakes that occurred during an eight-week period with painstaking accuracy. Writing in Science, the researchers explain that the unrest was likely the product of magma moving deep within Earth’s crust.

“We believe this method could be used as part of a wider toolkit of methods for volcanic unrest forecasting,” says co-author Stephen Hicks, based at UCL’s Department of Earth Science.

Read More: Moving Magma Under Santorini Lifted the Island and Caused Thousands of Earthquakes

Detecting Earthquakes With AI

Santorini is the site of one of the most catastrophic eruptions in the historical record, the Minoan eruption, which occurred sometime around 1620 B.C.E. More recently, in 1956, the area was devastated by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake.

The recent activity may not have been of that scale, but it did produce 48 quakes of magnitude 4.5 or higher and prompted an evacuation plan. At the time, authorities did not know whether it would lead to an eruption or a larger earthquake — a situation not helped by the fact that they did not know whether it was caused by volcanic activity or a tectonic fault slip.

The problem is that much of this activity occurs deep in the Earth’s crust, while current technology measures vibrations and deformations on the surface. This is where machine learning comes in. The team used AI to detect even the smallest of tremors, creating a database of tens of thousands of quakes. Hicks describes each of these quakes as “virtual sensors of stress at depth.”

These stress sensors enabled the researchers to detect activity almost 9 miles (15 kilometers) below the surface and up to 31 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Santorini.

Magma On The Move

The researchers determined the cause of the activity by analyzing the distribution of quakes. They discovered swarms were triggered by the horizontal migration of magma from an underwater reservoir deep within Earth’s crust.

“Most striking was that the intrusion did not move smoothly. Instead, it rebounded in waves — opening new fractures, closing others, and pumping magma forward in pulses,” lead author Anthony Lomax, an independent researcher, said in a press statement. “These pulses of magma pressure created a vast, dynamic, and cascading pattern of stress and triggered earthquakes in the surrounding crust.”

Meanwhile, changes to the Earth’s surface captured by satellite data enabled the researchers to estimate both the size and volume of the intrusions.

According to the press statement, there was enough magma to fill 200,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Fortunately, there was neither the pressure nor the buoyancy needed to produce an eruption.

“Our evidence suggests the magma causing the Santorini earthquakes wasn’t getting close to the surface,” Hicks said in the statement. “If we apply our technique to similar swarms of earthquakes in future, we could pinpoint where the magma would likely come out and potentially the amount.”

Using AI on Future Eruptions

Identifying the cause and improving understanding of the unrest is “essential for basic scientific understanding, public information, hazard assessment, and eruption forecasting,” the study’s authors wrote.

Hicks explains the team needs to test their method in different locations and environments, such as Iceland. As for activity on Santorini, the team hopes to build a 3D image of the crust during the event to determine how its physical properties evolved.

“We’d use a method known as seismic tomography, which is similar to an ultrasound or CT scan used in medical imaging,” says Hicks.

Read More: What’s Going On at Italy’s Campi Flegrei Caldera?

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