Understanding Earthquake Aftershocks

Short Wave

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🗓️ 22 February 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Monday another earthquake struck southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border. This time, the quake registered as a magnitude 6.3 — an order lower than the initial, devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake and the magnitude 7.5 aftershock that struck the area two weeks ago on Feb. 6. A magnitude 6.3 is still considered strong, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). And as NPR previously reported, some locals were inside buildings trying to recover belongings lost in the initial quake when Monday's aftershock hit.

It made us wonder: What are aftershocks? And how long will people in Turkey and neighboring countries like Syria have to endure aftershocks while piecing their lives back together? Days? Years?

For answers, we turned to earthquake geologist Wendy Bohon, who we've previously spoken to about the limitations of earthquake detection.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:06.2	Monday another big earthquake struck southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border.
0:10.9	Breaking news coming out of Turkey and Syria.
0:14.6	There was a magnitude 6.3 earthquake brought down buildings sparked panic.
0:20.6	This of course comes two weeks after that devastating quake that killed more than 47,000
0:26.5	people and left mass destruction across that area.
0:30.0	That initial quake from two weeks ago was a devastating 7.8 magnitude.
0:34.8	It was followed shortly after by a massive aftershock of similar magnitude.
0:38.8	We used to think of aftershocks as earthquakes that occurred along the same fault around
0:43.6	the area of the fault that broke that caused the main shock earthquake.
0:47.5	After the 1992 landers earthquake, when we had better size monitors and we could see
0:51.8	some of the smaller earthquakes, we observed that there was an increase in the rate of earthquakes
0:57.3	about 1 to 2 fault links away from where the main shock occurred, not just along the
1:01.8	fault where it had happened.
1:03.3	We called up earthquake geologists Wendy Bohon to help us make sense of this natural disaster.
1:08.2	So there's two things that have to happen for it to be an aftershock.
1:12.1	It has to happen after this bigger event within a particular period of time, which we define
1:17.5	as when you go back to the rate of seismicity that there was in the area before the main
1:23.2	shock happened, and it has to be within that certain distance from where the earthquake
1:28.0	occurred.
1:29.0	They're normal and they're expected.
1:30.6	In fact, they're the only earthquakes that we can actually kind of predict.
	...

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