Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.A magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey is a rare occurrence and underscores the importance of setting and enforcing building codes
A major earthquake struck southern Turkey early on Monday, causing extensive damage and killing thousands there and in neighboring Syria. Rescue workers have been searching the rubble of buildings for survivors, who face bitterly cold winter temperatures, as well as electricity and water outages—and the terror of continuing aftershocks.
The magnitude 7.8 temblor struck close to Nurdağı—not far from city of Gaziantep—at 4:17 A.M. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was also felt in Lebanon, Israel and Cyprus. The quake was followed by a magnitude 7.5 aftershock several hours later, as well as numerous smaller aftershocks. (The earthquake magnitude scale is logarithmic, so an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 is 10 times larger than one with a magnitude of 6.0. The former also releases 32 times as much energy as the latter.)
Monday’s quake involved a fault rupture that was relatively shallow—about 18 kilometers (11 miles) below Earth’s surface—making surface movements more intense. According to the New York Times, this earthquake caused the collapse of nearly 3,000 buildings in Turkey and killed more than 3,000 people across that country and Syria. The toll of those killed and injured is expected to rise because of the region’s high population density, particularly among the number of Syrian refugees who often live in makeshift or otherwise less robust structures.
To learn more about this notoriously seismically active region and why this earthquake was so damaging, Scientific American spoke with seismologist Ross Stein, CEO of the catastrophe modeling company Temblor.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Why is Turkey such a seismically active area?
Turkey is squeezed by a giant tectonic vise. The Arabian subcontinent is shoving northward, and it’s pushing Turkey north against basically a fixed boundary of northern Europe. And so what happens is Turkey is squeezed outward to the west, where it spills into the Mediterranean and ultimately gets shoved underneath Crete in a subduction zone like we see off Japan.
How common are earthquakes of this size and intensity in Turkey?
They’re rare—that’s the short answer. They are probably on the order of a once-a-century kind of event. We did have a magnitude 7.
