Expressive – iStock
Turkey earthquake
Accurate scientific calculations show that the amount of energy that can cause “tearing” the earth, can result in an #earthquake that is 53 thousand times stronger than the most violent earthquake recorded by mankind in its history!
The devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6, which Buried under its ruins 39 thousand victims between the two countries, and infected and displaced hundreds of thousands, sparking a global wave of panic and fear of a similar fate that might strike any part of the globe. The words “earthquake”, “disaster”, “earthquake”, “Richter scale” and “tsunami” are the most searched words on search engines around the world. And everyone began to think about possible scenarios of destruction, and whether an earthquake could occur that might cause the end of humanity, amid fears and questions about whether the earth’s crust had already been hit by irreversible cracks.
And promise February 2023 earthquake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, one of the strongest earthquakes that Turkish lands have witnessed since 1939. The earthquake strongly shook many Syrian regions, especially the governorates of Latakia and Aleppo, leaving thousands dead and wounded. The earthquake was also felt by Cyprus, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Georgia, Armenia and Abkhazia.
Expressive
Earthquakes usually occur near lithosphere plate boundaries and active faults. The North Anatolia Rift Zone is a particularly seismic area in Turkey. This rift extends from Izmit to Lake Van, which borders Iran, Georgia and Armenia. Almost all of Turkey’s densely populated cities lie on the northern border of the Anatolian plate, which is adjacent to the Arabian and African plates.
Earthquakes happen more often than we know about, estimated at about 100,000 a year! But some of them turn into devastating earthquakes that pose a threat to human life and buildings, which came against the backdrop of large movements of the earth’s crust at a shallow depth, while the number of observed earthquakes does not exceed more than a hundred or less per year.
Professor Nikolai Shestakov, Professor of Geographic Resources Monitoring and Development at the Polytechnic Institute of the Russian Far Eastern Federal University, explains how earthquakes occur in a simple way by saying: “Let us imagine that the Earth is a sandwich consisting of different layers. The upper part of it is the earth’s crust, it has a thickness Small about 10 to 100 kilometers, which is small compared to the Earth’s radius, equivalent to 6371 kilometers.The Earth’s crust is divided into plates, and these plates are in constant motion relative to each other.There are several types of plate interaction.Somewhere they collide and in areas where those collide Mountains tend to get higher, and the Himalayas are the perfect example of that.”
Expressive – iStock
According to what was reported by the Russian media, the Russian academic goes on to explain the behavior of earthquakes, saying: “Somewhere the plates diverge … and there are subduction zones, and in them, when the plates collide, one sinks under the other, so earthquakes occur there all the time. Some plates move in parallel with each other.” “Earthquakes occur along plate boundaries. Inside the plates, if earthquakes occur, they are insignificant and very rare. Turkey is in the complex interaction zone of three plates simultaneously, which are the African, Anatolian and Arabian.”
He notes that the deepest earthquake in history occurred in “2013 in the Sea of Okhotsk, off the western coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, 560 km west of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Its epicenter was at a depth of more than 600 km.”
During the two days of earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 and 7, more than 540 tremors occurred in the Mediterranean region, according to the European Mediterranean Seismological Center.
A week earlier, on January 28, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake was recorded in northwestern Iran, 34 kilometers southeast of the Iranian city of Khoy.
And the beginning of this year witnessed, in general, a record number of earthquakes. Aftershocks of 4.1 degrees occurred in central Italy near the Adriatic coast, one off the coast of Indonesia with a magnitude of 7.6, and a second with a magnitude of 4.7 near the Albanian city of Tirana. A 7-magnitude earthquake was also recorded off the coast of Vanuatu, at a depth of more than 27 kilometers, and another devastating phenomenon, the tsunami, resulted.
Fortunately, scientists have found that large earthquakes, especially deep ones, release energy due to the friction of lithosphere plates.
According to accurate scientific calculations, it is shown that the amount of energy that can cause the Earth to “tear”, can result in an earthquake that is 53,000 times stronger than the most violent earthquake recorded by mankind in its history.
What is the strongest earthquake ever recorded in human history?
* The Kamchatka earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0, and that was in November 1952. As a result of this earthquake, which occurred at the convergent borders of two plates in the Pacific Ocean, a huge tsunami was formed, which destroyed many areas in the Kuril Islands and Kamchatka.
* The 9.1-magnitude East Japan earthquake, which occurred in 2011, caused one of the most destructive tsunamis in human history, killing 20,000 people.
* An earthquake in Alaska with a magnitude of 9.2 occurred in the spring of 1964. There were no human casualties because the area was not densely populated.
* An earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean in 2004, with a magnitude of 9.3, and had a devastating effect on Indonesia. As a result of the tsunami, nearly a quarter of a million people died.
* The great Chilean earthquake of 1960, with a magnitude of 9.5, not only caused one of the most devastating aftershocks, but also caused a massive tsunami that swept almost the entire Pacific coast.
