July 19, 1738 Tsunami: Milos Island, Aegean Islands, Greece

Name: July 19, 1738 Tsunami: Milos Island, Aegean Islands, Greece
Start: 1738-07-19
Location: Milos Island, Aegean Islands, Greece

July 19, 1738 · Very doubtful tsunami

A tsunami caused by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake began at Milos Island, Aegean Islands, Greece on July 19, 1738. Its effects were recorded at 1 place.

Where the waves reached

The source (white) and every runup with a place, colored by the water height recorded there. A ring is a runup NCEI marks doubtful.

Under 1 m
1 to 3 m
3 to 10 m
10 to 30 m
30 m and more
Height not recorded

Tsunami warnings in force

Travel times

How long the first wave took to reach each part of the ocean, one line for each hour up to 24, estimated from the source and the depth of the sea.

The travel times are computed in your browser, which needs JavaScript.

1 to 4 hours
5 to 6 hours
7 to 14 hours
15 hours and more

Computed in your browser the way NOAA’s own travel time maps are: the wave travels at the square root of gravity times the depth, over NOAA’s ETOPO1 depths averaged to a 10 arc-minute grid. Checked against NOAA NCEI’s maps for 21 tsunamis over the first 24 hours, these lines fall within 10 minutes of NCEI’s at half the points compared and within 52 minutes at 9 in 10. They give when the first wave could arrive, not how high it is; bays, harbors and island chains finer than the grid can see it later. Not for use in a warning: see tsunami.gov.

The tsunami

Date: July 19, 1738
Source: Milos Island, Aegean Islands, Greece
Cause: Earthquake
Earthquake: Magnitude 6.5
Runups recorded: 1
Tsunami intensity (Soloviev-Imamura): 3
Waters: Ocean
How certain: Very doubtful tsunami
Source location: 36.800° N, 24.400° E

The toll

Damage: Moderate (about $1 to $5 million) with the earthquake or eruption that caused it
Houses destroyed: Some (about 51 to 100) with the earthquake or eruption that caused it

Where the literature gives no number, NCEI records a description on a scale of 1 to 4, printed here in its words. Damage is in millions of US dollars of the year of the event, not adjusted for inflation.

What the record says

NCEI’s account, from the sources it cites.

1738. Milos, 36.8 N, 24.4 E, tsunami intensity III. (reference #416)

Note: This tsunami is not listed in the later catalog, reference #2130: Soloviev, Sergey L., Olga N. Solovieva, Chan N. Go, Khen S. Kim, and Nikolay A. Shchetnikov, 2000, Tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea 2000 B.C.-2000 A.D., Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research, Volume 13, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 237 p.

Every runup

Nearest the source first. Heights are above sea level at the time; a tide gauge reads half the wave’s full height.

Where	Country	Km from source	Water height, m	Inland, m	Measured by	First wave, UTC	Deaths
Milos	Greece	8			Eyewitness observation of water height

Every tsunami in 1738 The 1700s Tsunamis of Greece The earthquake This day in weather history Alerts in force

Sources

Tsunami events and runups from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Historical Hazard Database, cited as NCEI/WDS, doi:10.7289/V5PN93H7. Public domain. Read 2026-09-24. NCEI tsunami event 416.