Monday, March 8, 2010

Turkey Earthquake Fun Facts


Turkey must be the most mushed-up country in the world, in regard to tectonics. It's between all these anvils of plates, trying to push it around.

But still, it's no Chile, in terms of how often a big quake hits a given piece of ground. You can see that everything is fairly diffuse, but a few of the major fault zones concentrate the strain a bit. The fact that every single earthquake knocks down crappy buildings here, shows that it might be a hundred years or more between quakes for any given piece of real estate. Well beyond living memory (just like Toronto!!).

An M7.0 right under Istanbul might resemble Haiti. Although they have building codes, we know from their last earthquake that they like to diddle their concrete and steel.

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