On the sixth of February, the Arab world woke up to a severe catastrophe that befell southern Turkey and northern Syria, as the two regions were struck at dawn by an earthquake that the US Geological Survey said had a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale. Its center was near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, and the earthquake caused until a moment. Writing this report resulted in the death of nearly 5,000 people and 24,000 wounded in the two countries, according to official figures, with hundreds of demolished buildings and homes. Specialists describe this earthquake as among the strongest in the history of the region, and even one of the strongest earthquakes to hit a residential area throughout history, and only the Erzincan earthquake that occurred in northeastern Turkey in 1939, and caused great damage at that time, is close to it in strength.
This type of major accident gives the impression that the activity of major earthquakes in the world is increasing, especially since people are hearing about an earthquake that hits the country every few weeks, and maybe every few days sometimes, this happens in almost all countries. Has the world really become such a dangerous place? This arouses the attention of the promoters of myths and conspiracy theories. They talk about the end of the world, the approaching planet Nibiru, and that there is a global government that knows that the world is about to end, but it does not disclose the matter.
What is an earthquake anyway?
Well, to understand the matter, let us start with what the earthquake means (1). Imagine that there is a piece of a puzzle (puzzle) with a length of one meter and a width of two meters, consisting of a number of pieces that must be placed next to each other in order to complete a picture of a famous artist, let it be the Egyptian actor Adel Imam for example.
The layer of the earth’s crust, which is the thinnest layer of the earth to the extent that it would be as thick as the crust of an apple if the earth were the size of an apple, is similar to this puzzle, as it is not a single slice flat on the rest of the layers of the earth, but rather a group of about 20 pieces that resemble pieces of the puzzle in their overlap, called (2) Plate tectonics, some large and some small.
These plates do not stand still, but rather move relative to each other, because they simply float on the viscous mantle layer below, but you do not usually feel these movements because they move at a very small rate, about 1-20 centimeters per year.
But sometimes those plates rub against each other violently and overlap in different ways, and from here a quantity of energy is released and rises to the top, vibrating the surface of the earth with different forces related to the force of friction occurring below, which produces earthquakes of different degrees on the Richter scale, each degree of which represents ten times the degree. The ones that precede it, for example, a 7-magnitude earthquake is ten times greater than a 6-magnitude earthquake, and in total earthquakes below 6 magnitude are considered to be of medium strength.
number of earthquakes
This happens all the time. In fact, you may not believe it when you know that there are about half a million earthquakes that hit the earth annually. About 100,000 of these earthquakes you can feel, and only a hundred can have a harmful or destructive effect, as happened in the case of the Turkey earthquake. the last one. In fact, earthquake statistics over the past twenty years (3) around the world show that the average annual earthquake rate has neither increased nor decreased, but has remained almost constant, and this is certainly the good fortune of mankind.
At that point, you might ask: Why, then, are we hearing about earthquakes more than ever before? Why do I already feel more earthquakes in my own house? In fact, there are a number of plausible answers to these questions, which do not include anything related to the end of the world.
One of those answers is related to earthquake measuring stations, as their number has increased and the accuracy of the tools that scientists use in measuring earthquakes has increased, and this means monitoring a greater number of them, and because these stations usually publish media data, you will, accordingly, hear about the occurrence of a greater number of earthquakes compared to – say, for example – A decade ago, here you will imagine that the number of earthquakes has increased, but it is only the accuracy of our devices (4).
In addition, the world has literally become a small, continuous village, so that you can hear about earthquake news coming from almost everywhere, and earthquake stations in most countries have pages on social media announcing every earthquake they monitored and remembering its exact center and strength. .
Why do we feel earthquakes ourselves more than in the past then? The answer is that people in homes usually feel medium earthquakes, but they ignore this feeling, and with the spread of earthquake announcements everywhere, everyone has become more experienced because he learned that the tremor he felt several hours ago was an earthquake, and therefore we feel medium earthquakes better than before. And because we quickly share the news through tweets or short posts, we confirm to each other what we felt, and from here a wave of earthquake news begins to spread among millions or even billions of individuals.
Add to that another important point related to the annual number of earthquakes (5). For example, in 2020 the world witnessed about 1,400 earthquakes, but in 2021 it witnessed 2,200 earthquakes (on a scale greater than 5 degrees). This means, accordingly, that you feel a greater number of earthquakes, but it does not It means that the number of earthquakes has increased, because the calculation of earthquake rates is not in one or two years, but rather scientists measure it over a long period of time (decades, for example), and here specifically it will become clear that although some years may be of greater seismic activity, the average around the world is constant so far.
This kind of misconception related to the increase in the number of earthquakes from one era to another has been studied by scientists as well. For example, it is known that large earthquakes of more than 8.0 degrees have struck the earth at a high (and even record) rate since 2004, but a study published in the “BN” journal AS (6) (PNAS), analyzed the historical record of earthquakes and found that this increase in heavy seismic activity was most likely due to chance.
In this study, a joint international research team examined the global frequency of large earthquakes from 1900 to 2011, and discovered that while the incidence rates for magnitude 8.0 earthquakes had been slightly higher since 2004 (an average of about 1.2 to 1.4 earthquakes per year) This increased rate was not statistically different from normal over this larger time scale.
Turkey is a special case
On the other hand, a number of regions around the world are more seismically active than other regions, and here specifically Turkey appears, as we have heard its name in the news more than once during the past years, for example in October 2020 the country was struck by an earthquake that measured 7.0 degrees and caused In the death of about 100 people, and in 2011 the country was hit by a stronger earthquake (7.2 degrees), which caused the death of more than 600 people. In fact, over the past century, Turkey has experienced about 50 earthquakes above 6 magnitude.
This is also a scientific reason, as we mentioned a short while ago that the movement of tectonic plates is closely related to earthquakes, and here we can conclude that the places that are located close to the areas where the tectonic plates meet can experience strong earthquakes, because the impact of the earthquake is strongest in the area where It is located above where the plates meet.
In fact, both Turkey and Greece are located in a “very active” seismic zone (7) because of the complex movements between three tectonic plates that fate wanted Turkey to be between them, where the two Eurasian plates move from the east and the Arabian ones from the south towards each other, pushing the small Turkish plate ( Anatolian plate) to the west. Added to this is the effect of the movement of the African plate towards the north. According to seismologists, the possibility of major earthquakes occurring in the region remains very high due to the pressure levels between the tectonic plates.
Earthquake myths
Earthquakes have always been associated with superstitions. In fact, the myth that the world faces a greater number of earthquakes is only one of a large group of myths spread around the world about earthquakes. The most famous of them is related to the dates of earthquakes, as people think that they tend to occur in the morning, but according to statistical studies in this field, Earthquakes can occur in the morning or evening with equal probability. The effect here may be psychological, as people are more alert to news of earthquakes occurring early on while they are asleep.
Also, no association was found between the times of earthquakes and the weather. Earthquakes occur in cold weather as they occur in hot weather. People think that hot, dry weather or cloudy weather is associated with the occurrence of earthquakes, and this is a misconception.
It is also a common misconception that a hole or crack may open in the ground during an earthquake to swallow homes and people, and most likely, American films are responsible for promoting this misunderstanding. But in fact, there is no recorded case of an earthquake that caused cracks to swallow up cities. Earthquakes can cause cracks in the ground, however these cracks are generally very small and very rarely exceed one or two meters wide, and these cracks are usually shallow.
In the end, earthquakes occur all the time, and kill thousands of people annually, but the magnitude and catastrophic event usually leads us to think that something unfamiliar is happening, and it is as huge as the event itself. This is called “Proportionality bias”, which means that we We humans tend to attribute major events to exceptional, sometimes superstitious, causes.
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