The biggest earthquake in Turkey in eight decades: why did it happen?

Turkey and Syria have been victims of the most devastating earthquake in the last century in the Middle East. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit central and southern Turkey and northern Syria on Monday has released energy similar to the explosion of 1.2 million tons of trinitrotoluene and its shock wave has spread to different points of Europe, reaching even the Spanish seismographs.

The earthquake occurred almost 18 kilometers deep at 2:19 (Spanish time) and, in just seconds, More than 3,000 buildings collapsed in much of Turkey and northern Syria. Since then, more than 50 aftershocks have hit the area. 100 kilometers away from the epicenter of the first, another earthquake of magnitude 7.5 once again made itself felt in the region, in this case in the province of Kahramanmaras.

Turkey and Syria, areas of high seismic activity

The area where the earthquake occurred is the meeting point of three tectonic plates: Anatolian, African and Arabian. The first, which includes part of the Dead Sea and the country led by Erdogan, is a tectonic subplate of the Eurasian, which has two large sets of transform faults, the northern, that caused the severe earthquakes in 1999 and this one, which is aligned with Cyprus. The Arabian includes the entire Arabian peninsula and the African, as its name suggests, includes part of the Mediterranean Sea and the African continent.

The Anatolian plate occupies much of Turkey and is, by its nature, which causes the greatest seismic activity in the country. Despite being small, being trapped between other large tectonic plates, a small movement can put pressure on various fronts and cause large earthquakes.

A slip on the eastern Anatolian fault where the Arabian and African faults meet has caused the ground to crack. In fact, as a result of the earthquake and the subsequent aftershocks Huge cracks have been recorded on the runways from Hatay Airport, south of Turkey.

Only in the year 2022, Turkey recorded more than 20,000 earthquakes. Of them, almost 130 exceeded magnitude 4 on the Richter scale, while one exceeded level 6, according to data from the national emergency agency (AFAD) collected by the Turkish media. Over there, It is common for children to receive information on how to act in the event of an earthquake. In fact, in November 2022, a nationwide drill was organized that spread simultaneously through 81 provinces of the country.

However, since 1999, Turkey had not suffered a deadly earthquake. By then, the country had to regret the death of more than 17,000 people by a 7.4 earthquake produced in the city of Izmit, located about 100 kilometers east of Istanbul. In addition, Turkey suffered its deadliest earthquake in the last century in 1939, when about 33,000 people died and 100,000 were injured by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Erzincan, in the east of the country.

Seismologist Emilio Carreño, former director of the Spanish Seismic Network, He has assured that the victims could increase above 10,000. “There are towns to the north of the fault that have not been visited, and there will be a lot of people who are not even considered missing,” said the expert.

The earthquake has also caused Italy to activate its preventive tsunami warning, although it was subsequently deactivated after no major earthquakes occurred in the eastern part of the Anatolian Peninsula and Cyprus.

Could something like this happen in Spain?

The president of the Illustrious College of Geologists, Manuel Regueiro, has assured in an interview in Europa Press that there are “few” chances that a seismic event of a similar nature will occur in Spainalthough he has stated that it cannot be ruled out.

In fact, it would not be the first earthquake in the Iberian Peninsula: in 1755 there was a great earthquake in Lisbon that caused a tsunami of 15 meters. In 1968, Cape Saint Vincent, in the Algarve, suffered a tsunami, and Granada was the victim of another in 1954.

In fact, the expert has indicated that the southern part of the Peninsula is one of the most at risk. Along the Mediterranean stretches a huge fault that runs like a belt through the Strait of Gibraltar, southern Italy and the Balearic Islands. These points are thus the meeting point of two of the largest tectonic plates on Earth: the Eurasian plate and the African plate, making Andalusia and Murcia the areas with the highest seismic risk in Spain.