How Turkey’s fault lines cause devastating earthquakes in the region

The earthquake that hit the Turkish-Syrian border last Monday (6) adds to a list of more than 70 tremors of magnitude equal to or greater than 6.5 reported in the region and surroundings since 1900. The expressive volume is due to the fact that this is one of the areas with the highest seismic activity in the world.

Turkey is located in an area with two major geological faults, the North Anatolian Fault and the East Anatolian Fault—both, as their names indicate, on the Anatolian Plate, the tectonic plate that encompasses most of the country’s territory.

The 7.8 magnitude quake that struck at 4:17 am local time, as well as the 7.5 magnitude one 7.5 hours later, hit the eastern fault. Other earthquakes with similarly devastating consequences have already occurred on the northern fault, such as an earthquake in 1999 that left 17,000 dead.

These faults are the result of tectonic plates moving against each other. The eastern fault results from the movement of the Anatolian and Arabian plates, while the northern fault results from the movement of the Anatolian and Eurasian plates.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Monday was one of the strongest in the last hundred years in the region, with the same intensity as the tremor that in 1939 left at least 33,000 people dead in Turkey.