Months-long seismicity transients before the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake, Türkiye

On February 6th, 2023, the devastating magnitude MW 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake in South East Türkiye ruptured multiple fault segments of the East Anatolian Fault Zone separating the Anatolian and Arabian tectonic plates. This earthquake and its aftershock sequence was followed by a second large earthquake with MW 7.6 about 9 hours later and some 90 kilometres away from the epicenter of the first mainshock. Combined, the ground shaking from these powerful devastating earthquakes led to nearly 60,000 casualties, 300,000 affected buildings and about 120 billion USD financial damage.
In our study, we employed seismic catalogue and waveform data from regional seismic networks recorded since 2014 to study seismic processes preceding the MW 7.8 Kahramanmaraş mainshock. The spatio-temporal analysis of regional seismicity allowed to observe an 8-month long crustal seismicity transient suggesting a preparation process in the region around the epicenter. This highlighted the high and – more importantly – increasing seismic hazard there. The observed spatio-temporal clustering and localization of seismicity is known from controlled laboratory rock deformation experiments and has been observed for some – but by far not all – large continental earthquakes during the last decades. Would you like to know more? Here is our manuscript.