Cyprus’s Civil Defence Force will activate the CY-ALERT early warning system on Tuesday 10 November between 11:00 and 15:00, sending test alerts to mobile phones in coastal areas during an earthquake and tsunami exercise.
The force said the alerts are solely part of the NEAMWave2026 exercise, there is no real danger and the public does not need to take any action.
More than one alert will be sent through the exercise and test channel, to phones in the coastal areas covered by the exercise that have test alerts switched on.
The exercise helps to check early warning procedures and strengthen the readiness of the relevant services, the force added.
Tsunamis have reached Cyprus before. A review of tsunami events on the island’s coasts, published in the journal Geosciences in 2022, describes one in 1222 as the last catastrophic tsunami, saying it hit Paphos and Limassol, claimed lives and flooded the city and fortress of Paphos. The authors also cite radiocarbon dating showing that a tsunami in 1303 affected the Cape Greco area, and report that an earthquake near Paphos in 1953 produced waves of around one metre that caused no damage.
More recently, tide gauges at Paralimni registered a tsunami about half a metre high after the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria on 6 February 2023, Christodoulos Hadjigeorgiou, head of the Geological Survey Department, told Phileleftheros at the time.
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