Did massive earthquakes move Turkey five or six metres toward the West?

The earthquakes that hit Turkey on Monday shifted the tectonic plates the country sits on, a seismologist has claimed. Carlo Doglioni, president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, has said Turkey has shifted “by five to six metres” compared to Syria.

Tectonic plates moved 3 meters. "It's as if Turkey moved southwest," Carlo Doglioni, president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics & Volcanology, said. The total size of the fault is at least 150 kilometres long. "Everything happened in a few tens of seconds." pic.twitter.com/wU5KJTiA4o

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Let’s take a closer look: What happened? The epicentre was about 26 km east of the Turkish city of Nurdagi at a depth of about 18 km on the East Anatolian Fault. The quake radiated towards the northeast, bringing devastation to central Turkey and Syria. Most of Turkey is located on the Anatolian tectonic plate, which sits between two major plates, the Eurasian and African, and a minor one, the Arabian. Doglioni told newspaper Corriere Della Sera,  “It happened that what we call the Arabian plate moved about 3 metres along a northeast-southwest direction with respect to the Anatolian plate; we are talking about a structure in the border area between this world, that of the Arabian plate, and that of the Anatolian plate.” “The two flaps moved relative to each other. In other words: it is as if Turkey had moved relative to the Arabian plate towards the Southwest.” Doglioni told website Italy 24 Turkey has thus ‘slipped by five to six metres’ compared to Syria. Why did this happen? Doglioni told website Italy 24 the tremors created a type of fault seismologists call “shallow transcurrent” with a hypocenter – the deep place where it breaks out between 15 and 20 kilometres. “The massive laceration involved an area 190 kilometres long and 25 wide, violently shaking the ground and causing a sequence that reached the two most intense peaks nine hours apart,” Doglioni told the website. “But in reality the earth continued to tremble and to destroy with often significant intensity, around 5-6 degrees on the Richter scale. Meanwhile, an infinite number of minor jolts have also been added, around 200 already in the first hours.”

Doglioni told the newspaper the displacement was more than three metres.

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He told Italy 24 the most accurate data would be available in a few days with the ESA Sentinel and ASI CosmoSkymed satellites. The Daily Mail quoted Dr Bob Holdsworth, a professor of structural geology at Durham University, as saying that estimate was ‘perfectly reasonable’. “There is a fairly predictable, widely documented relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake and the typical offset that occurs,” Dr Holdsworth told the newspaper. “As a rule of thumb, a magnitude 6.5 to 6.9 event is associated with an offset of around one metre – whilst the largest known earthquakes can involve offsets of 10 to 15 metres,” he added. “The faults that slipped yesterday in Turkey are strike-slip faults that involve mainly horizontal displacements, and so the overall offsets in the region of 3 to 6 metres proposed here are perfectly reasonable,” he said. The East Anatolian Fault is a strike-slip fault. In those, solid rock plates are pushing up against each other across a vertical fault line, building stress until one finally slips in a horizontal motion, releasing a tremendous amount of strain that can trigger an earthquake. The San Andreas Fault in California is perhaps the world’s most famous strike-slip fault, with scientists warning that a catastrophic quake is long overdue. Toll crosses 17,000 The toll from Monday’s quakes, which struck in the early morning, passed 17,000 on Thursday across both countries. It was the biggest natural disaster to strike the region since 1999, when a similarly powerful quake killed more than 17,000 people in Turkey. On the ground, many people in Turkey and Syria spent a third night sleeping outside or in cars in freezing winter temperatures, their homes destroyed or so shaken by the quakes they were too afraid to re-enter. Hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless in the middle of winter. Many have camped out in makeshift shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins, often desperate for food, water and heat.

At a gas station near the town of Kemalpasa, people picked through cardboard boxes of clothes dropped off as donations.

In the port city of Iskenderun, Reuters journalists saw people huddled round campfires on roadsides and in half-crushed garages and warehouses. The only lights were the spotlights focused on cranes trying to remove slabs of debris. Authorities say some 6,500 buildings in Turkey collapsed and countless more were damaged in the quake zone where some 13 million people live. Turkey’s AFAD disaster agency set up meeting points for people left homeless and wanting to be evacuated from the area. More than 28,000 people have been brought out so far, it said. In Maras, people camped inside a bank, taping a sheet in the window for privacy. Others had set up on the grass median of a main road, heating instant soup on fires and wrapping themselves in blankets. In Antakya, some 30 tents erected by the Turkish Red Crescent in a park were all packed. Many people spent the night in their cars. Few petrol stations had fuel and kilometres-long queues stretched at those that did. In the devastated Syrian town of Jandaris, Ibrahim Khalil Menkaween walked in the rubble-strewn streets clutching a folded white body bag. He said he had lost seven members of his family including his wife and two of his brothers. “I’m holding this bag for when they bring out my brother, and my brother’s young son, and both of their wives, so we can pack them in bags,” he said. “The situation is very bad. And there is no aid.” In Syria, already devastated by nearly 12 years of civil war, more than 3,000 people have died, according to the government and a rescue service in the rebel-held northwest. With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.