Two earthquakes they tore apart the South of Turkey and the North of Syria with significant intensity at 2.17 on Monday morning and at 11.24 (Italian time) reaching respectively the magnitude of 7.8 and 7.5 on the Richter Scale. Let’s reconstruct the dramatic event with Professor Carlo Doglioni, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv). The two earthquakes are part of a single seismic sequence unleashed at the intersection of four plates that collide continuously — Anatolian, Arabica, Eurasian and African —, accumulating energy until causing the activation of a long fault. For this reason, the entire area is classified among those with the highest danger in the Mediterranean.
What is the cause of the earthquake that seems to have caused a slip of the Anatolian plate of about three meters?
There has been a horizontal sliding, therefore on the same plane, of the Anatolian plate towards the Southwest with respect to the Arabica plate. This has generated a type of fault that seismologists call “shallow transcurrent” with a hypocenter, i.e. the deep place where it breaks out, between 15 and 20 kilometers. In other words, Turkey in the estimates has actually slipped by five to six meters compared to Syria. The most precise data will be available in the next few days after the detection with the ESA Sentinel and ASI CosmoSkymed satellites.
How has the area affected by the earthquake changed?
The massive laceration involved an area 190 kilometers long and 25 wide, violently shaking the ground and causing a sequence that reached the two most intense peaks nine hours apart. But in reality the earth continued to tremble and to destroy with often significant intensity, around 5-6 degrees on the Richter scale. Meanwhile, an infinite number of minor jolts have also been added, around 200 already in the first hours.
Can a phenomenon of this intensity last for a long time?
Yes, arriving at manifesting a sort of prolonged “seismic epidemic”, as someone has defined it, which could continue for days, perhaps months if not years, as has happened in some cases in the past. Impossible to predict but until the accumulated energy is released the phenomenon will not stop.
Two shocks so strong, what power did they reach?
The energy released by the two most intense shocks reached much higher levels than the earthquakes that have hit Italy in recent decades. It has been estimated that the first was about 500 times higher than that manifested by the 2016 Amatrice earthquake and 30 times higher than in Irpinia in 1980.
