Last week’s twin earthquakes in Türkiye are comparable to the world's largest nuclear test, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, told Anadolu on Tuesday.
In an evaluation of the magnitude and characteristics of the quakes, whose epicenters were southern Kahramanmaraş province’s Pazarcık and Elbistan districts, Caplan-Auerbach said the earthquakes were “a truly tragic event.”
“It's a somewhat unusual event in that this portion of southern Türkiye, although it does get earthquakes, has not seen an earthquake of this size in quite some time. That said, it's a very seismically active area. It's just that the timescales over which the Earth generates earthquakes and the timescales where we experienced them are somewhat different,” she added.
Emphasizing that the region is seismically active and there have been major earthquakes over time, Caplan-Auerbach said the growth of the population over time led to more casualties after such quakes.
She also underlined that the quakes happened at a depth that is very close to the surface, making the tragedy even worse.
“And that enhances the ground shaking, causing it to be a more violent experience,” she added.
