That’s a huge earthquake. Close to as large as you will get outside a full rupture along a subduction zone fault-line. scary shit
Turkey sits atop the Anatolian Plate, a block of the Earth’s crust that is slowly rotating counterclockwise and shifting west with time, about an inch of movement every year. But pent-up stress caused by collisions with the African plate and Eurasian plate result in frequent earthquakes. - WaPo
Guessing it will be interpreted by far too many as a smiting instead of our planet itself is inconceivably powerful/dangerous, and we’re absolutely fucked if it unleashes its true potential. Or gets hit by an asteroid.
Depends on the type of fault line. For instance, from what I read from seismologist, the largest earthquake you could get along in California and the San Andres fault line is around this number (most think an 8.0 is about the most extreme) due to the nature of the fault line. The fault line runs next to each other, unlike a subduction fault line which, think Tōhoku, Japan tsunami/quake and Indonesia tsunami/quake where the fault line runs into and under one another. A full rupture subduction earthquake is capable of, again from what I read, a 9-10 which is massively larger than a 6 or 7 or even an 8.0. Basic way it works, a 7.0 is 33 times less strong than a 8.0 and would be over a 1,000x less than a 9.0. (In terms of the energy released). A 9-10 is essentially the extreme of what the earth can *likely* produce on its own. After that you are talking about something hitting the earth (asteroid for instance) and the scale is tipped to a 12.0. If that happens that’s in the area where life as we know it either ends or eventually ends. Or drastically is altered to an extreme. Best way my stupid brain has allowed the two most famous falt lines in the USA to work is this. If you and a friend are shoulder to shoulder walking in the opposite direction and pushing on each other and one slips you both probably don’t fall down but kind of lose your balance. Now imagine two nfl lineman pushing on each other as hard as they possibly can and one player loses his footing. Happy birthday to the ground and the other player, from his momentum, likely falls over him as well. That essentially happens in a full-rupture. Hundreds of miles of the fault-line (over 600 for pnw I believe) are instantly displaced. Japan wasn’t expected to have a range as high as it did (9.1) because it’s not as long as the one in PNW and full-ruptures aren’t as common. Parts of the island of Japan moved 7+ feet in the aftermath (making it larger) and shifted the axis of the earth 4 inches (yes, you read that correctly). Parts of the sea floors can rise 40+ feet in an occurrence. In fact, if you visit Seattle, Alki beach in West Seattle sits about 20 feet below these houses perched on a mini-cliff. That mini-cliff is the result of an earthquake in 900-ish AD from a local fault line in Washington that produced, they believe, over a 7.0. All of this information is to say a full-rupture is frightening. There is a reason one in Indonesia ended up producing waves so powerful people in Africa ended up dead. This one in Turkey? That’s a strong-motherfucking earthquake. TLDR: compared to a 6.0 a 7.8 is closing in on being 1,000 times stronger with the amount of energy released and would be close to the extreme edge of what the San Andres fault line could produce to localize it a bit more for most of this board.
The non linear scale always seems to trip ppl up. The world series earthquake in SF in '89 was a 6.8. Probably our biggest earthquake in recent history in a populated area. This one was 30-40x stronger
So a full on 100% earth quake would just leave me feeling awkward, physically uncomfortable, and unable to finish?
eh, we're poor at conceiving grand scale notions anyway. it's like saying imagine a punch from Mike Tyson then imagine one fifty times harder then imagine one a thousand times harder than that and your brain's general response is "either of the last two kills you so who cares". nobody feasibly conceives of "energy released" when discussing quakes, people tend to only look at destruction and there's a cap to the amount of destruction where anything over simply becomes the same in their minds. it's more a matter of teaching people what "logarithmic" means as a base concept and then warning them of the most used ones (which I think are the Richter scale and decibels) so that they don't think 100dB is only twice as loud as 50dB or a 4.0 is just half as bad as an 8.0.
also worth mentioning that Turkey has a very important election coming up in a few months. wonder how the populace will approach that in the face of this tragedy.
Well this is probably going to end up being an easily 10K+ casualty event, especially with that massive aftershock.
An area with enough resources to build multi-story residential, but not enough resources to build structures that can resist earthquake damage is a recipe for human carnage. Videos are hard to watch. According to my Juggsian research, this is the ~75th strongest quake in the last 85 years, so on average this could be the year's strongest quake. Unfortunately, it was near a lot of people in vulnerable buildings.
USGS earthquake map for southern Turkey is pretty impressive, something like 57 quakes the last 24 hours all over 4.3 magnitude. Makes rescue efforts more complicated when compromised structures could still come down if an aftershock hits too close Looks like there are dams in the area too. www.usgs.gov
yes I believe he has the highest recorded presidential approval rating (9/11) and the lowest (2009 financial crisis)
Yeah, the flipside of this is when very strong earthquakes happen in places where such events are rare and the underlying geology poorly understood. If New Madrid happened tomorrow you'd see similar scenes in St. Louis or Memphis.