Unthinkable: Turkey earthquake energy could power New York for over 4 days

Inconceivable energy. Turkey’s deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake was so strong its energy could power New York for more than 4 days seismologist Giannouka Attanayake pointed out to the New York Times.

The energy released by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Monday morning was equal to about 32 petajoules, the seismologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia said.

This amount of energy is enough to generate 8.88 million megawatts continuously for one hour. It is also equivalent to the energy released by approx 8 million tons of TNT.

The Times noted that another seismologist, Renato Solidum, told the agency that in 2013 a magnitude 7 earthquake generated as much energy as many as 32 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

The local magnitude scale, also known as the Richter scale, is logarithmic, meaning that every time the magnitude increases by 1, the energy released by the earthquake is about 31.6 times stronger.

So when we compare a magnitude 7.8 earthquake to a 6.7 earthquake — like the one that hit the same region in Turkey in January 2020 — the former releases almost 45 times more energy.

Monday’s earthquake occurred on the East Anatolia Fault, where only three earthquakes of magnitude 6, or greater, have been recorded in the region since 1970, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). One of the region’s deadliest earthquakes occurred in 1822, when a magnitude 7 earthquake was said to killed 200,000 people.

Survivors of Monday’s quake also endured several unusually strong aftershocks, including a magnitude 6.7 quake that struck just 11 minutes after the initial quake.

Another 7.7-magnitude aftershock struck the area about nine hours after the quake, though the tremor was less strong because it occurred at a greater focal depth, according to the USGS.

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