A devastating earthquake hit Syria on February 6th, 2023, killing and injuring thousands. In the weeks to follow, we have seen rescue efforts far and wide to pull people out of rubble, reconnect families, and help the injured.
I wanted to explore some of the aftermath of the earthquake, the success rescue stories, and why experts knew it was just a matter of time before Turkey experienced this earthquake.
According to CNN, people were still being pulled from the rubble up to ten or eleven days after the earthquake hit, and they are alive. One 13 year old boy, named Mustafa, was pulled out alive, 288 hours after the earthquake.
We have probably all heard about the miracle baby, who was still attached to her mother via umbilical cord. The hospital she was at received dozens of calls asking for information to adopt, and they got in contact with a distant relative of the child who will likely take and raise the miracle baby.
These miracle stories are providing a small ray of light to a very dark disaster. Usually, in the event of a disaster, the rule of four applies to how long the human body can survive. Four minutes without air, four days without water, and four weeks without food. But experts say this is not always the case, under extreme and rare circumstances, like mentioned above, the human body can do amazing things to survive.
While the rescue stories are heartwarming, we must remember the lives lost in the earthquake. The earthquake took the lives of at least 42,000 people, and took down thousands of buildings, ruining towns and lives all over the country.
While natural disasters are inherently unpredictable, scientists knew it was a matter of time before a large earthquake, or two, struck Turkey. Underneath Turkey, four tectonic plates interact with each other, moving and colliding in all different directions, according to ABC.
Alexander Stewart, a geology professor, says “that stress is essentially squeezing Turkey out to the west into the Aegean”. All the stress beneath the surface is squeezing Turkey like a banana. As seen in the image above, the “Anatolian plate is essentially slipping along the fault lines of the North Anatolian fault zone, the most seismically active fault zone in the world”, Stewart says.
Experts estimated that Turkey was in the top 20% of regions most likely to receive an earthquake of this magnitude. Other regions include Japan and Haiti. While the United States is more prone to earthquakes on the western side, there should not be an earthquake as devastating as Turkey due to the resilience of the infrastructures in western states, similarly it is the same reason Japan does not have as many casualties with the same magnitude earthquakes.