Map of Turkey: The city of Van, on the far right of this map near a large lake, was the closest to the earthquake.Courtesy USGSA 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck eastern Turkey near the city of Van at 5:42am today, the most powerful earthquake in Turkey for at least a decade.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) originally gave the magnitude as 7.3 but later corrected it to 7.2 with a depth of 12.4 miles.
The Turkey's Kandilli observatory told a news conference it estimated 500-1,000 people could have been killed as a result of the earthquake.
Within an hour of the initial 7.2 earthquake, two aftershocks of magnitude 5.6 struck the same region.
Your Comments, Thoughts, Questions, Ideas
Explore
Recent comments
Subscribe
Connect with Science Buzz on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also subscribe to our RSS feed using any newsreader software.
Boğaziçi University in Turkey provided a press bulletin today with maps, updates on casualties/damage, and information on historical seismicity in the area.
From the fault plane solutions shown in the bulletin, the quake was caused by movement along a reverse fault. The black quadrants of the "beachball"-like diagrams indicate where the P-wave (compressional) first-motions are away from the source. Arild Andresen from the University of Oslo provides a good tutorial on how to interpret fault plane solutions.
Post new comment