Months-long seismicity transients preceding the 2023 M<sub>W</sub> 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake, Türkiye.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38016987.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-42419-8 and PMC identifier 10684546.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Short term prediction of earthquake magnitude, time, and location is currently not possible. In some cases, however, documented observations have been retrospectively considered as precursory. Here we present seismicity transients starting approx. 8 months before the 2023 M<sub>W</sub> 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake on the East Anatolian Fault Zone. Seismicity is composed of isolated spatio-temporal clusters within 65 km of future epicentre, displaying non-Poissonian inter-event time statistics, magnitude correlations and low Gutenberg-Richter b-values. Local comparable seismic transients have not been observed, at least since 2014. Close to epicentre and during the weeks prior to its rupture, only scarce seismic activity was observed. The trends of seismic preparatory attributes for this earthquake follow those previously documented in both laboratory stick-slip tests and numerical models of heterogeneous earthquake rupture affecting multiple fault segments. More comprehensive earthquake monitoring together with long-term seismic records may facilitate recognizing earthquake preparation processes from other regional deformation transients.