Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear.

Rescue efforts continue in a wide area encompassing Turkey and Syria, where a magnitude 7.8 earthquake

hit early this morning local time.

The death toll is now risen to at least 3,400 and will likely go higher.

Ampures, Peter Kenyon says the quake was widely fell.

As far north as Lebanon, as far south as Cairo, that kind of sums it up.

It's been called by some the biggest other say, well, it's the second worst earthquake

here in the past 100 years.

But either way, it was hugely destructive.

Now the death toll is considerably lower than a deadly quake in 1999.

That left more than 17,000 people dead.

This is a lot less than that, of course, but officials do expect the toll to keep rising.

The question is how high?

NPR's Peter Kenyon, the quake toppled hundreds of residential buildings, rescueers on both

sides of the border.

He did research the rubble for additional victims or survivors.

seismologists may say this region of Turkey was long overdue for a major quake.

NPR's Jeff Romfeld has that story.

Technically speaking, Turkey is being squeezed between the Arabian Peninsula and the rest

of Asia.

That makes the entire nation an earthquake hotspot, but this particular region hadn't had

a major quake for 100 years or more.

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