A monster stirred under Lebanon last month. Not everyone felt it, but across the country came various reports on May 11 of buildings wobbling briefly like twigs in a breeze. The earthquake, measuring 5.5 on the Richter Scale, was only a reminder, however, for the people in Saida, Beirut and Tripoli, that the greatest potential threat they face is not civil strife, war or revolution, but rather it is a monster sleeping beneath the sea not 20 kilometers from Lebanon’s population centers. Unknown until 2004, the monster’s existence has been proven with sonar by an Italian expedition and its potential wrath was mapped one year ago by scientists of the American University of Beirut (AUB). The geological surveyors dryly called the monster “Mount Lebanon Thrust”. The term describes a reverse fault system, a type of crack in the earth’s crust that has the reputation to cause particularly destructive earthquakes. This
