Turkey earthquake opened 190-mile-long fissure | Hacker News Reader

Turkey earthquake opened 190-mile-long fissure

space.com

132 pointsBrajeshwar53 comments

Images here [1] and a before and after gif someone uploaded here[2] give a better a better idea than the article's included image of what it looks like. Also, there is a video of the earthquake here[3] that is positively terrifying.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-earthquake-...

[2] https://gfycat.com/mellowblindflickertailsquirrel

[3] https://www.twitter.com/pusholder/status/1623815189257719810...

Link [3] doesn't work.

https://twitter.com/pusholder/status/1623815189257719810/ will get you there

There is also a tunnel in Japan that was built through an undiscovered mud volcano.

The video is probably counfounded by camera itself vibrating. You'd have to have camera suspended in the air (say a drone) to have realistic idea of the movement.

When the cars and the overpass on the left are hopping, it isn't because the camera is vibrating. The last few seconds before the camera cuts out shows the ground moving up and down incredibly far and fast. Again, that could not be some illusion because the camera is vibrating.

> the U.K. Centre for the Observation & Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes & Tectonics (COMET)

TUKCFTOAMOEVAT worked hard to get a cooler name.

Every time I see something like this I’m shocked that we can build infrastructure in fault zones at all. What happens if a tunnel passes the a a fault line and an earthquake happens. Some googling suggests they wouldn’t build a tunnel through this large of a fault and for smaller faults the tunnel is designed to safely deform with the ground in an earthquake

Come to think of it, there must be an instance of a tunnel somewhere that had a crosswise shear of a few cm.

Yes. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shear-tension-ring-fract... and others.

You want them to empty San Francisco? In Chicago they tunneled into the lake and flooded it, but you wouldn't say we shouldn't build next to water would you?

Sorry if I gave that impression. I love sf and I currently live there. I just thought it was interesting how infrastructure must be built to handle this. As an aside I believe sf is not built directly on top of a fault line that’s quite this active. There’s are major faults near by so in a major earthquake I think there might be some sheer on tunnels, but nothing like this

It's ok! The bronze age collapse was brought on partially by earthquakes too. Fault lines and waterways are very useful but can be dangerous. I know Japan has lots of earthquakes but they're better prepared. I heard they never sell buildings, only land and if it has a building on it they often demo it to make it safer.

> Two cracks in the Earth's crust opened in the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey on Monday, Feb. 6, satellites believe

I can't really figure out what this sentence was intending to say. I hope we're not actually taking the satellites at their word.

Was about to post exactly that. Such strange phrasing.

I'm pretty sure these low quality space.com articles are written by 2 cent AI or a factory of monkeys. They've always been horrible

space.com deserves the same status as business.com

Space monkeys!

Perhaps it’s machine translation.

s/believe/show/

The Religion of Satellites:

    SPACE WILL BE FAKED
    AS LONG AS SPACE IS
    SEEN AS REAL BUT
    REALITY IS ONLY
    REAL IF YOU DO
    NOT ALLOW IT
    TO BE FAKED!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqji77BMxz4

I believe that sAItellites and bAIlloon are looking over us!!!

20,000 people killed. That's a mind blowing number. Didn't realize it was that high.

20,000 reported dead so far. That's far from a complete tally, sadly.

People were asleep in their homes when the first one hit. Many apartment buildings were not built to Turkey's post-1999 earthquake construction standards, so they collapsed. Many of those were built after 1999, but the government let developers cut corners and pay a fee for amnesty.

Like COVID in the US and China, there are a lot of political pressures that will encourage an undercount.

The 1999 İzmit earthquake had 17000 casualties, roughly the same order of magnitude, though not quite as high.

Indeed! I fear that it will end up an order of magnitude higher. Just looking at the types of buildings collapsed, hearing the next day that they'd already counted 7,000 collapsed buildings, and then "tens of thousands" of collapsed buildings a day later; IDK the current count. Even if we estimate an average of only 10 people per building, which seems low for multistory apartment buildings at a time when almost everyone is home sleeping, the coming numbers are likely to be horrific. Hard to even think about.

Please donate to Syrians if you can. They have absolutely no infrastructure and they hardly received any international aid. It's a disaster with unbelievable impact on the already fragile Syrian community.

For reference, sanctions have been partially lifted for this. Do not worry about legal repercussions.

Those sanctions are often enforced by financial institutions (banks). They rather stop transactions or freeze your account than take a chance.

Quite hard actually to find a good way to donate into the relevant Syrian region

How do you donate to syrians, or more accurately how do you make sure your money isn't being taken by sometime else? Would be nice to directly give to them instead of organizations.

As someone with zero training in earth sciences, I gotta think: when those happen under the sea, the water must rush into the gap, right? The interior of the Earth must be full of water.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2204528-the-oceans-are-...

That's a strange conclusion. Gaps in the crust under the surface of the sea will if they open up deep enough cause sea water to come in contact with magma which will rapidly solidify and if it is less deep it will simply fill up the gap, the interior of the earth is a ball of molten iron covered with a layer of molten rock and given the density difference there is absolutely no way that water would displace any of that.

In a sense, yes. At fault zones underwater, the seawater does 'mix' with magma and volcanic rock, changing the form of the magma and rock. Rock is more dense than water, even when rock is liquid, so the center of the earth won't fill with liquid water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient:

“As a general rule, the crust temperature rises with depth due to the heat flow from the much hotter mantle; away from tectonic plate boundaries, temperature rises in about 25–30 °C/km (72–87 °F/mi) of depth near the surface in most of the world.”

⇒ Even under pressure, I think most water would boil before it could reach the core. Certainly if there’s magma a steam explosion is likely.

As a mere mammal, it's hard to comprehend the scale of things like the earth. The crust on the ocean floor is "only" about six to twelve kilometers thick. This is only one one-thousandths to two one-thousandths of the earth's radius. It might as well be a drop of sweat entering a crack on your chapped lips by comparison. Some would get into the lithosphere, but that's still quite near the surface, again, next to everything else.

Once you get past the crust, and then the various layers of the mantle, to the liquidy bits, well ... the density is so high that water would be completely forced to float to the top even if you could get the water down there. Plus it would be exposed to high temperatures and might well be steam (depending on local pressures).

It's actually not liquid (at least that's the theory). It's more like butter. The magma that you see at the surface is due to the rocks melting since there is a decreases in pressure and there are other minerals in the rock i.e. water. Don't quote me on that... that's what I remember from my Geology class from 10+ years ago.

The earth is best thought of as a ball of rock with an iron core that is slightly damp.

With such a long fissure, there's gotta be a security camera that recorded this happening somewhere.

See Maursault’s comment in this same thread.

you can still donate https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey

Fossils galore?

There is a 300km long fissure and the article contains one tweet with four pictures? And googling it reveals another set of like three images and rest of links to this article?

Enjoy - https://youtu.be/YnGH8aS5NyU

iOS assisted translation of the text below the video:

> On February 6, an earthquake occurred in Turkey and Syria, which, according to the latest data, killed more than 24,000 people. In terms of the number of victims, it has become the largest for the whole world since 2010. After the earthquake, a giant fault formed in the Turkish province of Hatay, bordering Syria. He passed through a field with olive trees. According to the Turkish TV channel NTV, the fault depth is 30 meters and the width is 200 meters.

Wow, that's a lot larger than I would have expected.

That video looks uncanny. I suppose it's due to the lighting and the low resolution/focus, but if you told me that the entire video was a GPU rendering I would probably believe it.

When I watched it on my phone it looked great. On a decent sized screen, not so much. That sent me searching. Here’s another video from NTV, a Turkish TV channel.

https://www.ntv.com.tr/video/turkiye/ntv-ekibi-depremin-ikiy...

Probably the same video, but here it has better quality: https://www.haberturk.com/zeytin-bahcesinde-dehsete-dusuren-...

Was that an orchard? Very nice trees.

My guess is an olive orchard, it's fairly typical of the region

They might survive then! I’ve heard of bulldozed Palestinian olive trees miraculously thriving.

That was really looking terrifying. Strange how the ground can sink like that but trees adjutant seems to be fine like nothing happened.

Tried looking it on Sentinel Hub but based off the visual resolution, the cracks are mostly are too small to see from space with the optical satellites that just about show individual buildings.

My assumption is that you can only really statistically tell the difference with the Synthetic Aperture Radar data or if you're on the ground right beside or looking at the very largest ruptures in the country like that olive farm.

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