Russian scientist explained the origin of a giant crack in the Turkish province of Hatay

“This is not a break in the earth’s crust, but a landslide”

Terrifying footage of a new video with giant transformations of the earth’s crust after the Turkish earthquake that occurred on February 6, spread around the world. They show how the open ground literally cut into two halves of an olive grove located in the province of Hatay. There was a space the width of a football field. We talked about the nature of this phenomenon with Alexei Zavyalov, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, head of the laboratory at the Institute of Physics of the Earth RAS.

The area where the earthquake occurred is located at the intersection of three tectonic plates: Anatolian, Arabian and African. The Arabian Plate is moving north, pushing the Anatolian Plate (which contains most of Turkey) to the west. The movement of the plates creates pressure on the fault zones between them. At some point, the wings of the faults move relative to each other (as happened in this case), the accumulated energy is released, resulting in an elastic seismic wave that reaches the Earth’s surface and destroys buildings.

According to Aleksey Zavyalov, on February 6, the shift of crustal blocks occurred at a depth of 10–18 kilometers along the East Anatolian Fault.

– Alexey Dmitrievich, how do experts classify the giant fault that has arisen in the province of Hatay – 30 meters deep and about 200 meters wide?

Don’t call it a rift. A fault is a larger structural geological formation that, most often, only geologists can identify on the ground. In addition to the East Anatolian, North Anatolian, there are, for example, the San Andreas faults in California (USA); our Lake Baikal also arose once on the site of a break in the earth’s crust. By the way, its expansion continues, and, perhaps, in millions of years, a real ocean will splash in the place of our Baikal.

“So what should we call the giant fissure in Turkey?”

– It’s just a landslide – a secondary phenomenon associated with the occurrence of a strong earthquake. Apparently, the olive grove is located on a slope, and when it shook, the ground slid down 200 meters.

– By what signs can you determine that this is a landslide?

– They, as a rule, always appear this way: the soil layer slips on the surface, which is also possible due to the presence of a flooded sole. If it were a fault, on satellite images we would see how it cuts through some kind of limiters, between which there is an olive grove. However, they remained intact, which convinced us that we had an ordinary landslide in front of us.

Can you give examples of similar events that have happened before?

– In 2018, a landslide occurred in the Khabarovsk Territory from the steep left slope of the Bureya River valley. True, it was not associated with an earthquake, but it was so powerful that it blocked the river. Even earlier, in 1948, in Tajikistan, as a result of the Khait earthquake, a landslide from the mountain “covered” the village of Khait. This type of landslide also includes the resulting “fault” in Turkey.

Let’s go back to the earthquake in Turkey. What, in your opinion, causes the movement of lithospheric plates, which leads to such catastrophes?

— Convective currents in the mantle.

— Do they also lead to the expansion of the Baikal Rift?

– Apparently, yes.

HELP “MK”

The East Anatolian Fault is an active fault in the earth’s crust, passing under Turkey. It extends to the northeast, where it intersects almost at a right angle with the North Anatolian Fault. The area of ​​intersection of these two faults is the most dangerous in seismic terms. Earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 7 are repeatedly noted here.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28976 dated February 21, 2023

Newspaper headline:
We thought it was a fault, but this is a landslide