A researcher predicts a possible earthquake in the Yedisu district of Türkiye's eastern Anatolia province of Bingöl following continuous seismic activity and energy accumulation.
The last earthquake in Yedisu occurred on May 1, 2003, with a depth of 15 kilometers (9.32 miles), which lasted about 17 seconds with a magnitude of 6.4. The strike-slip fault responsible was not the East Anatolian Fault, but rather a ruptured right-lateral strike-slip fault perpendicular to the East Anatolian Fault, said Earth Scientist professor Feyzi Bingöl.
Bingöl evaluated the aftershocks that have occurred recently, stating that energy released by twin earthquakes that hit the 10 southeastern provinces of Türkiye was 130 times stronger than the one that occurred in Italy in 2016, a prominent Italian scientist reported.
The magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes, centered in the Kahramanmaras province, were felt by 13 million people in Adana, Adıyaman, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye and Şanlıurfa.
Earthquakes of this magnitude are not very common in Türkiye and are highly uncommon worldwide. The expert notes that the Kahramanmaraş disaster has caused the Yedisu region to be active. This region is where three plates – the Arabian plate in the south, the African plate in the west, and the Anatolian plate in the north – meet.
As a result of the eastward breaks in the sections up to Elazığ and the Pütürge district of Malatya, which caused instability in the area, the energies of minor active faults in the Kayseri, Sivas and Malatya regions to the east of Konya increased. Unavoidably, an energy buildup was brought about by these significant faults. This caused new earthquake hits to start happening in this area. Due to these two fault lines, thousands of aftershocks occurred within the Eastern Anatolian faults, which will likely continue for some time.
Underlining that they still experienced the aftershocks of the earthquakes in Elazığ on Jan. 24, 2020, Bingöl said: "The aftershocks of these magnitudes can continue for five to 10 years and will mainly occur toward the south of Malatya, Adıyaman and Hatay. Apart from that, there are different faults in Kayseri, following continuous movements resulting in tremors of 4 and 4.5 magnitudes in the region."
