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Seismic “epidemic”. Consequences of the earthquake in Turkey

Yesterday’s earthquake “moved” Turkey three meters to the southwest and caused aftershocks that may not subside for years.

On Monday morning, a powerful earthquake struck southern Turkey, killing thousands of people. His tremors were felt even in Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece, Israel.

Although earthquakes are not uncommon in this part of the world, yesterday’s was considered Turkey’s strongest and deadliest in decades. This has already caused the shifting of the lithospheric plates, and experts are predicting new shocks around the world.

seismically active zone

Earthquakes in Turkey are not uncommon. The country is located at the intersection of three tectonic plates: Anatolian, Arabian and African. The Arabian is moving north, so the Anatolian plate, where Turkey is located, is being pushed west. The movement of tectonic plates creates pressure on fault zones along their boundaries. This sudden release of pressure causes earthquakes and tremors.

NASA

Why are earthquakes so destructive?

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey was larger than those that struck the area earlier, according to the US Geological Survey. Therefore, during yesterday’s earthquake, an enormous amount of energy was released.

Modern seismologists use the moment magnitude scale, which is the amount of energy released by an earthquake (the Richter scale is no longer used, although it is sometimes misquoted in the media).

This scale is not linear: each step up represents the release of 32 times the previous energy. This means that a magnitude 7.8 actually releases about six thousand times more energy than the more modest magnitude 5 earthquakes that typically occur in the region.

“We tend to think that the energy of an earthquake comes from the epicenter, but in fact it is related to the movement along the fault line. The stronger the earthquake, the more the fault line moves,” said Jenny Jenkins from Department of Earth Sciences, Durham University.

Seismologist Ross Stein, CEO of the catastrophe modeling company Temblor, mentioned two other reasons why the aftershocks on February 6 were so bad. According to him, yesterday’s earthquake was related to a break in the fault, which is relatively shallow – 18 kilometers below the Earth’s surface, which made the surface movement more intense. The second reason is a relatively long shock section – about 400 kilometers.

Departure of Turkey

Yesterday’s earthquake caused a geological shift that moved the lithospheric plates by three meters, said Professor Carlo Doglioni, president of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).

Doglioni said the earthquake occurred at the junction of the East Anatolian, Arabian and African plates.

“One of the large plates of the earth’s crust that stretches the length of Turkey has moved. It is one of the most active fault lines in the Middle East, along with the Dead Sea fault line in Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Syria, one where the Arabian Peninsula separates from Africa In other words: Turkey appears to be moving southwest relative to the Arabian Plate,” he said.

The professor added that the three-meter change in location is only an estimate for now, the exact data can be provided after analyzing the satellite images. Doglioni also emphasized that the earthquake in Turkey is considered very strong.

New pushes

The USGS has recorded over a hundred aftershocks in the region. In the past 24 hours, more than a thousand earthquakes have occurred in the world, including 539 with a magnitude greater than 3.0. The strongest earthquake of magnitude 6.0 occurred on February 6 in the Turkish city of Kahramanmarash. The last shock of magnitude 4.2 at 13:30 on February 7 was also recorded in the area.

Experts expect aftershocks and new earthquakes to continue for some time.

“This whole area, all parts of the Earth will slowly repair, break, tear and come to a new equilibrium,” said Michael Steckler, a geophysicist from Columbia University (USA).

The Italian professor Doglioni generally admits a prolonged “seismic epidemic”,

“Which can last days, maybe months, if not years, as happened in some cases in the past. It’s impossible to predict, but until the accumulated energy is released, the phenomenon will not stop,” he told Italy 24.

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Source: korrespondent

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