The President of the OASP, Ethymis Lekkas, spoke about the earthquake that occurred a few hours ago in Istanbul on ERT.

The first earthquake occurred around 30 kilometers west of Istanbul. What we should emphasize is that a major earthquake in Istanbul has been expected for many years based on the data that existed globally. All the research groups around the world estimated that we should have an earthquake of 7.5 degrees, so that the last part of the fault that had not been broken by the great Anatolian fault would break. The last fault rupture, the last big earthquake, was in 1999 in Ismet, in Nikomedia, that is, where we had huge destruction and 17,000 people who died. The last piece is the one that passes south of Istanbul, that is, it is the one that was activated about half an hour ago, “Lekkas said.

“This part of the fault essentially could have given an earthquake of 7 to 7.5 on the Richter scale. However, this 6 magnitude earthquake, as well as the subsequent 5 magnitude earthquakes, are very substantially far from having the maximum activation of the fault. That is, the 7.5 from the 6 is about 40 times as far away. That is, maybe the 40 earthquakes of magnitude 6 are equivalent to an earthquake of 7.3 to 7.4 magnitude. So we can expect a gradual easing, in the next few hours, in the next few days,” he noted.

“We don’t know if a fault will break and give a bigger earthquake or if it will remain at the 6-degree level. That is, we should have a lot of 6-degree earthquakes, and that is if the whole fault breaks, because the whole fault doesn’t need to break in this period. However, in any case, we are dealing with a very rich seismic – I would not call it a post-seismic sequence. It is still too early to know whether it is the earthquake or a major earthquake that occurred on 6.2. It will be tremendously interesting to see how the seismicity in the greater city area evolves,” he concluded.