Newswise – An international team led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, for the first time, has accurately determined the age and structure of the East Anatolian fault, which extends from east to south-central Turkey and was involved in the formation of the Anatolian tectonic plate.
The area that caused the earthquakes was where two of the worst earthquakes occurred in Turkey and Syria in February 2023. Although the researchers’ findings do not help predict the time or magnitude of the earthquakes, they help geologists know more about the time the region has been shaking. how major earthquakes have changed the landscape over time, which can help drive construction decisions and building placement.
Their paper is published in geology, a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the geosciences published by the Geological Society of America.
The faults we see on Earth are cracks caused by the movement of the planet’s tectonic plates. This movement causes stress, and the release of this stress causes the earthquakes that people experience on land.
“There are many tectonic plates on Earth,” said Donna Whitney, lead author of the paper and McKnight University Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota’s NH Winchell School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “They have changed shape and size and position over time, but we usually see the same shape. The Anatolian plate was formed very recently in a geological sense, so the processes that formed it are easy to find in the study of geology. There have been many arguments about the age of the Anatolian plate and the East Anatolian fault, but we were able to show with our data that it probably formed five million years ago.
The researchers’ findings came from a project supported by the Whitney National Science Foundation called Continental Dynamics-Central Anatolian Tectonics (CD-CAT), which brought together researchers from several fields of geology and countries to study the Anatolian plate and fault zones. .
Whitney and his team began studying the Anatolian plate back in 2011 because they found evidence that over millions of years, the center of the plate was deformed – a process that occurs at the edges of tectonic plates. Then, five million years ago, there was a big change. Since then, almost all tectonic movements have been focused on two major faults that cause earthquakes: the North Anatolian Fault and the East Anatolian Fault.
By having the cold rock in the East Anatolian fault and looking at the data collected during the project, the CD-CAT researchers determined the structure of the continents and the mantle in the region and confirmed that 5 million years have been known. the creation of the Anatolian plate.
“Knowing the seismic history of the region is very important in anticipating disasters related to the way people interact with the land,” Whitney said. “We cannot predict that there will be an earthquake of ‘X’ magnitude at a certain time, but we can know what has happened in the past, how big it has been, and what fault. movement has affected the place. We need to understand these buildings because people live near them, and there is infrastructure near them. “
In addition to Whitney, two of the most important contributors to the study were seismologist Jonathan Delph, who is an assistant professor at Purdue University, and the University of Arizona geochronologist Stuart Thomson, who worked on many research projects over the years.
Other team members were Christian Teyssier (University of Minnesota Twin Cities); Susan Beck (University of Arizona); Gilles Brocard (University of Lyon, France); Michael Cosca (US Geological Survey, Denver); Michael Darin and Paul Unhoefer (Northern Arizona University); Nuretdin Kaymakcı and Bora Rojay (Middle East Technical University, Turkey); Maud Meijers (University of Graz, Austria); Aral Okay (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey).
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