Latest situation after the terrible earthquake in Turkey

On February 6, 2023, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake hit southern Turkey near the northern Syrian border. The quake occurred about 9 hours after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred 95 km southwest. This event ruptured either the near-vertical left east-west fault or the right north-south fault.

Turkey Earthquake UPDATE

The tentative location of the magnitude 7.5 earthquake is located near the triple junction between the Anatolian, Arabian, and African plates. The location and mechanism of the quake are consistent, but not necessarily, with the series of events that occurred on February 6, with aftershocks occurring since the M7.8 quake nine hours earlier. Same fault strand. The East Anatolian Fault Zone hosts the westward extrusion of Turkey into the Aegean Sea.

Turkey Earthquake Updates

An earthquake is usually represented as a single point on a map, but it confuses planes with dimensions. A 7.5-magnitude leaf-slip earthquake typically collapses a fault about 120 km long and 18 km wide. Preliminary finite fault model estimates indicate a highly compact source with a major slip irregularity ~50 km long and ~30 km wide.

Horrible Earth Quake in Turkey

The region where the 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck on February 6 is seismically active. Before the series of quakes that began on February 6, only three earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater occurred within 250 km of the series of February 6 earthquakes since 1970. The largest of these, a magnitude of 6.7, occurred northeast of the February 6 quake in January. All of these previous earthquakes occurred along or near the East Anatolian Fault.

Earthquake of 7.8 magnitudes

Despite relatively mild quakes at the epicenter of the February 6 quake, southern Turkey and northern Syria have experienced devastating quakes in the past. Aleppo, Syria has suffered several major earthquakes in the past, but the exact location and magnitude of these quakes can only be guessed at. Aleppo was hit by an earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.1 in 1138 and an earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.0 in 1822. Estimates of deaths from the 1822 earthquake ranged from 20,000 to 60,000.