What caused the earthquake in Turkey and SyriaExBulletin

A man searches for people under the rubble of a destroyed building in Gaziantep, Turkey, on Monday, February 6, 2023. Mustafa Karali/AP .

Caption switch Mustafa Karali/Associated Press

A man searches for people under the rubble of a destroyed building in Gaziantep, Turkey, on Monday, February 6, 2023.

Mustafa Karali/AFP

The region of Turkey and Syria hardest hit by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks is known for large earthquakes, but it’s been decades since the last major quake hit this one decades ago.

More than 5,000 people have been killed across the region.

Here’s a look at what happened, geologically speaking, and why it caused so much damage.

Earthquakes are common in Turkey and Syria

The Arabian Peninsula is part of a tectonic plate making its way north into the Eurasian plate, and the entire nation of Turkey is being squeezed sideways.

“Arabia is slowly moving north and colliding with Turkey, and Turkey is moving out of the way to the west,” says Michael Stickler of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

This tectonic shift has been behind earthquakes for thousands of years in the region, including the one that destroyed the Syrian city of Aleppo in 1138. Recent earthquakes, such as the one that struck Izmit in 1999, have killed many thousands.

Monday’s earthquake is believed to be the strongest earthquake Turkey has seen in more than 80 years.

This particular region was lagging behind a large region

Most of the largest earthquakes in the past 100 years have been along the North Anatolian Fault.

But tension has been building along another major fault: the East Anatolian Rift. This fault has seen some large earthquakes in the past, says Patricia Martinez-Garzon, a seismologist at GFZ Potsdam, a research center in Germany. But lately, there hasn’t been much activity.

“It was unusually quiet in the last century,” she says.

Some researchers are beginning to suspect that the fault was caused by a major earthquake, according to Fatih Bulut, of the Kandilli Observatory and Seismological Research Institute at Bogazici University in Istanbul. His research group and others have run computer models showing that this fault can have an earthquake of magnitude 7.4 or greater.

“This is not a surprise to us,” Bulut told NPR.

But that doesn’t mean seismologists can pinpoint exactly when a major quake will strike, according to Ian Mayne, a seismologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. He says the time between large earthquakes on a fault can vary slightly in unpredictable ways. “They’re not like buses, they don’t come on a schedule.”

And not all the vibrations were caused by this one fault. The first earthquake extended into the Dead Sea Transformation Zone, another fault zone where the Arabian, Anatolian, and African plates meet. Another 7.5-magnitude quake struck hours later on a nearby fault that has been mapped but is not part of the East Anatolia fault.

“It’s a very busy and complex area with multiple fault systems,” says Stickler.

This was a “strike slip” earthquake.

This earthquake happened because “two pieces of land slide horizontally over one another,” Stickler says. It is the same type of earthquake that occurs along the San Andreas Fault in California.

In this case, the Arabian plate is sliding past the Anatolian plate.

This sliding motion also means that the shaking has spread for many kilometers along the fault, Bulut says. He says the affected area is “very large”. “Ten Structurally Damaged Cities in Turkey”.

Turkey has seismic codes in place to try to prevent buildings from collapsing, but Bulut says because this area has weathered a major earthquake for decades, some older buildings are likely to be at risk. “Sometimes there are things that are very old, built before there were rules,” he says.

Stickler says he suspects that even some of the new buildings may not have been up to code. “I know, for sure, in Istanbul,” he says, “there’s a lot of illegal construction going on.”

More aftershocks are likely

The USGS has already recorded more than a hundred aftershocks in the area, and experts predict that they will continue for some time.

“This whole region, all parts of the Earth will slowly adjust and break and loosen and reach a new equilibrium,” says Stickler.

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