Why did the earthquake in Turkey and Syria cause all this destruction and deaths?

Weather of Arabia - The disaster began at 4:15 am on Monday (February 6), when residents of southern Turkey and northwestern Syria were surprised by a strong earthquake that shook buildings and caused widespread destruction, leaving thousands trapped under the rubble.

The scale of destruction and the number of victims made the earthquake one of the deadliest since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, which caused a tsunami that killed nearly 20,000 people and led to a nuclear disaster, according to Live Science .

The earthquake, caused by a 100-kilometer rupture between the Anatolian and Arabian plates, had a magnitude of 7.8 and was centered near the city of Nordagi in southern Turkey. Amid frantic search and rescue attempts, several aftershocks (including one almost as powerful as the original earthquake) caused more destruction.

According to death figures so far, the Nordağı earthquake is the third deadliest earthquake in Turkey in the last century, surpassed only by the 1999 Izmit earthquake, which killed more than 17,000 people, and the 1939 Erzincan earthquake, which killed nearly 33. thousand people.

But why do earthquakes in this region have the potential to cause so much destruction and death?

The answer lies in four main reasons:

• complex tectonic plates.
• Soft soil.
• Construction that does not comply with earthquake-resistant building standards.
• The time of the earthquake occurred in the early morning.

complex tectonic plates

The area in southeastern Turkey and northwest Syria is vulnerable to dangerous seismic activity because they lie at the intersection of three massive tectonic plates - the African, Anatolian and Arabian - whose collisions cause earthquakes.

Monday's earthquake is likely to have come from a rift in eastern Anatolia, where parts of the Arabian and Anatolian plates become stuck together due to friction. Sudden horizontal displacement of plates in the release of energy in the form of seismic waves.

According to " Judith Hubbard ", a visiting assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, the Global Positioning System (GPS) showed that the blocks move laterally across the East Anatolian Rift about 15 mm annually, and that a 7.8-magnitude earthquake caused them to slide 5 meters on average, which equates to about 300 years of slow expansion.

Once the fault ruptured, the catastrophic impact of the earthquake was amplified, and the East Anatolia fault rift hit a densely populated region. Monday's earthquake was shallow, 18 kilometers below the surface. This means that the energy of the seismic waves of the earthquake did not dissipate in the layers of the earth before it reaches the surface of the earth and begins to shake residential buildings.

(The area experienced aftershocks following the initial 7.8-magnitude earthquake - (Photo credit: USGS))

Soft soil and liquefaction phenomenon

Once the buildings were shaken, the soft sedimentary soils in the area were affected by the vibrations more strongly and the buildings were more likely to collapse than if their foundations had rested on rock. According to the USGS, the soils of the Nordaghe region are moist enough to cause liquefaction. - And then the soil behaves more like a fluid than a solid during the violent vibrations of an earthquake.

Other causes: buildings and the time of the earthquake

Other reasons why the earthquake is so deadly are the safety of the buildings and the time of day when the earthquake occurred.

Because the earthquake occurred in the early morning hours, people were mostly asleep and had little chance of escaping from the collapsed buildings, many of which were not sufficiently earthquake-proof.

In the aftermath of the 1999 Izmit earthquake, stricter building codes ensured that modern buildings in Turkey were designed to be earthquake-resistant. However, many of the older buildings, which often housed those in the poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods, were erected before the laws took effect and have remained vulnerable to collapse.

After the earthquake, some of these buildings experienced complete collapse, with the upper floors falling directly onto the lower floors, making it almost impossible to rescue the people who were crushed inside.

This disaster serves as a stark reminder of the region's extreme weakness in preparing for earthquakes, especially since Syria and Turkey are located near the boundaries of plate convergence and sliding, which means that the region is prone to earthquakes, and disaster management in both countries must take this fact into consideration, and we must learn from this experience, so that The priority is to upgrade buildings in the area to be able to withstand earthquakes.