0
Trending On Twitter

Turkey-Syria Earthquake Explained

by Tall.o

The seismic waves of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ripped through Europe yesterday. (twitter.com/DrWendyRocks/….... According to a Reuters report, 4300 people have been killed and gas pipeline damages have led to fires. Turkey lies at the centre of three tectonic plates - Anatolian, Arabian and African. Arabia is moving northwards into Europe, causing the Anatolian plate (which Turkey sits on) to be pushed out westwards. The movement of the tectonic plates builds up pressure on fault zones at their boundaries. Faults are cracks in the earth's crust along which there is movement. These can be massive (the boundaries between the tectonic plates themselves) or very small. It is the sudden release of this pressure that causes earthquakes and ground shaking.The Turkey earthquake is likely to have happened on one of the major faults-the East Anatolian fault or the Dead Sea Transform fault. Earthquake energy is actually caused by movement along an area of a fault. The bigger the earthquake the larger the fault area that will have moved. For 7.8 magnitude, there is likely to have been movement over an area roughly 190 km long and 25 km wide. This means the shaking will be felt over a very large area. Light shaking was felt by about 610,000 people as far away as the Turkish capital of Istanbul (around 815 km away), as well as Baghdad in Iraq (800 km) and Cairo in Egypt (950 km). After major earthquakes there will be many smaller earthquakes known as aftershocks as the crust readjusts to the changes in stress. In the first 12 hours after the initial tremor in southeast Turkey there were already three other earthquakes above magnitude 6.0. A magnitude 7.5 aftershock occurred further to the north on a different but adjacent fault system: the Sürgü Fault which was powerful enough to count as a separate earthquake in its own right. While aftershocks are usually significantly smaller than the main shock, they can have equally devastating consequences, further damaging infrastructure that was damaged by the first earthquake and hampering rescue efforts.

  • Duration: 02:34

Share

Keywords

turkey, turkey quake, turkey earthquake, news, news 2023

Related Videos

More
More
More +