Don’t say a word about your Monday
Visual images of collapsing and collapsed buildings are horrible. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria before dawn Monday. A severe aftershock struck at midday. Early numbers (headlines keep shifting) are over 1,500 dead and climbing, per a Guardian report:
- At least 1,500 people have been killed after two powerful earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria within the space of 12 hours. The death toll is expected to rise, with search and rescue operations under way across the region as many buildings have collapsed and there are thought to be many people trapped in the rubble.
- Official figures from Turkey say 1,014 people were killed there, 5,383 were injured, and 2,818 buildings had collapsed. Syria’s health ministry said that more than 326 people had been killed and 1,042 injured. In addition to those figures, the White Helmets rescue service in the north-west of Syria in areas not controlled by the government put their death toll at 221, giving a total of 1,561 confirmed dead.
CNN meteorologist Chad Myers explained what makes this type of quake different from those that strike the Pacific Rim:
The 7.5 aftershock was “an earthquake in itself,” Myers told CNN’s This Morning. “It would have been the strongest earthquake since 1999 in the region.”
We always talk about the epicenter, but in this case we should talk about the epi-line.Two massive tectonic plates – the Arabian and the Eurasian – meet underneath Turkey’s southeastern provinces. Along this fault line, “about 100 miles from one side to the other, the earth slipped,” said Myers.
Seismologists refer to this event as a “strike slip” – “where the plates are touching, and all of a sudden they slide sideways,” said Myers.
This is unlike the Ring of Fire, which runs along the west coast of the United States. In this zone, earthquakes and tsunamis are often caused by subduction – where one plate slides below another.
But in a “strike slip,” the plates move horizontally, rather than vertically.
“Why that matters is because the buildings don’t want to go back and forth. And then the secondary waves begin to go back and forth as well,” said Myers.
Help is on the way from across the globe. Aftershocks could last for weeks. And it’s winter. Not a word today about your Monday.
Death and destruction won’t stop conservative pundits from talking about the balloon, will it?