Turkey is one of the most active seismic areas, being located on or in the area of several fault lines.
Turkey was rocked by two big earthquakes on Monday. The first occurred in the morning at 04:17 local time, which registered a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale, and the second was registered around noon, also with a huge magnitude of 7.5.
The area of Turkey where the two earthquakes hit northern Syria is prone to earthquakes, due to the fact that it is at the intersection of three of the tectonic plates that make up the earth’s crust: the Anatolian, Arabian and African plates.
The Arabian plate is moving north in Europe, causing the Anatolian plate (on which Turkey is located) to be pushed west.
As the two large plates move, Turkey is essentially being crushed, experts say, quoted by BBC News.
The movement of tectonic plates generates pressure in the fault zones at their boundaries. It is the sudden release of this pressure that causes earthquakes and ground shaking.
This latest earthquake is likely to have occurred on one of the major faults that mark the boundaries between the Anatolian and Arabian plates: either the East Anatolian Fault or the Dead Sea Transform Fault. Both are “slip faults,” meaning they allow some movement of plates moving past each other, a seismologist explained, according to the publication The Conversation.
From the graphic animation above, it can be seen that, after sliding, the Arabian plate separated from the African plate by a maximum of 3 meters, and the rupture extended over a distance of about 300 kilometers.
Consequently, earthquakes are quite common in Turkey. The country’s disaster and emergency management authority (AFAD) recorded more than 22,000 such events in 2022.
The worst recorded so far was a magnitude 7.6 earthquake that hit İzmit in 1999, killing over 17,000 people.
Source: BBC, The Conversation
Publication date: 08-02-2023 20:38
