Faults have been moved before by earthquakes; During the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the earthquake zone moved about 6 meters, and in Turkey itself, the Anatolian rift moved during the 1999 Izmit earthquake by more than 2.5 meters.
The catastrophe that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria still draws the attention of experts around the world to assess it from a scientific point of view, and the head of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Professor Carlo Doglione, was He said in a statement to the Italian press The recent earthquake caused one side of the Anatolian plate – on which Turkey is located – to move about 3 meters to the west.
This is of course uncertain; The final results of this earthquake will be determined after looking at the satellite data, but this type of movement is already possible in tectonic plates.
The nature of the earth’s plates
To understand the matter, we can first start by imagining that the earth is a huge apple, here the crust layer will be the crust of that thin apple, but it is in fact with a thickness of between 30 and 70 kilometers in the Earth’s continents.
However, the earth’s crust differs from the apple’s crust, as it does not extend over the globe as one continuous block, but it consists of 20 pieces intertwined with each other called tectonic plates, and it is similar in its overlap to pieces of a puzzle or a puzzle that contains a picture that must be completed piece by piece.
These tectonic plates swim above the Earth’s mantle layer, and move a very small distance each year (from 1 to 20 centimeters) closer or farther from each other, or friction between them.
dangerous friction
As two tectonic plates approach each other in one place, they rub against each other for a period of time and fall behind What scientists call a “fault”.They may slide apart, but sometimes they overlap so much that they press against each other for a while, which can cause an earthquake.
Doglioni assumes that the Kahramanmaraş earthquake occurred in an area where two tectonic plates collided tightly, and with the pressure release between them, their limbs shifted 3 meters.
active regions
That’s a reasonable number, actually. Because that has happened before; During the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the earthquake zone moved about 6 meters, and in Turkey itself, the Anatolian rift moved during the 1999 Izmit earthquake by more than 2.5 meters.
AndBoth Turkey and Greece are in a “very active” seismic zone. Because of the complex movements between 4 tectonic plates, where the Eurasian and Arabian plates move towards each other, they push the small Anatolian plate towards the west. The compression in this region is also due to the northward movement of the African Plate.
This causes the emergence of two major friction lines: the first is the North Anatolian Fault, the second is the East Anatolian Fault, and the last earthquake occurred due to slipping between the two sides of the East Anatolian Fault.
According to seismologists, due to these two faults, the possibility of large earthquakes in the region remains very high due to the high pressure levels between the tectonic plates.