The earthquake surprised the experts. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Turkey and Syria killed at least 2,000 people on Monday, before being followed by a magnitude 7.5 aftershock, almost as strong as the first. A rare fact.
The first earthquake, which occurred overnight from Sunday to Monday, occurred at the level of the East Anatolian fault line in eastern Turkey, where two tectonic plates meet.
It is an “important tectonic border between Anatolia and Europe”, explains the CNRS on its site. “Their relative movements, currently on the order of 2 cm per year, regularly cause devastating earthquakes there,” says the research center.
A “big earthquake for the region”
If therefore the occurrence of an earthquake in this area is not surprising, its intensity, located at 7.8 on the Richter scale, is instead rare in this region.
“Tonight’s earthquake surprised the seismological community by its magnitude,” Martin Vallée, a seismologist at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, told BFMTV.
Seismologist Jérôme Vergne agrees: it is a “big earthquake for the region.” This zone “has not been ruptured by an earthquake of this magnitude since the 12th century, although we had had big earthquakes in the 18th and 19th centuries,” he explains to BFMTV.
The earthquake is not very deep, just about fifteen kilometers, but this is not good news a priori for the specialist. “Because this focus is relatively close to the surface, the accelerations and ground motions are even greater,” he says.
A second jolt almost as strong
The first quake was followed by numerous aftershocks, including a magnitude 7.5 quake, which occurred Monday morning. “It is a scenario that we did not expect,” Martin Vallée, a seismologist at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, told BFMTV.
The specialist indicates that an earthquake “almost always has aftershocks”, but that a second earthquake almost as intense as the first is rare.
“It happens very rarely in this context where the earthquake itself was already very strong,” he says.
“One would have thought that (the first) earthquake due to its magnitude releases all the tensions that had accumulated in the earth,” he develops.
As of now, the seismologist says he is worried, while the first quake has already left more than 2,000 dead according to an interim report. “Because of its size, more damage is expected from this second quake,” he warns.
Especially since other crashes can still happen. “We can expect them to decrease in magnitude,” she hopes.
Source: BFM TV
