In Türkiye the double strongest earthquake ever recorded on the mainland

The two earthquakes that shook Turkey on 6 February 2023 represent, in addition to the strongest in the country's 2,000-year history, also the most intense pair ever recorded on the mainland.

In fact, it is extremely rare for two events so strong and close together in time and space to occur within a continent, while they are more likely to occur in the contact areas between continents and oceans or within the latter.

This is what emerged from a Peking University study published in the journal Earthquake Science, which made use of a new method to calculate earthquake intensity, paving the way for advances in both earthquake research and disaster response.

Researchers led by Xinyu Jiang set out to solve the current problem of discrepancies found in calculating the magnitude of the two events, using a new technique that measures the so-called 'seismic moment magnitude' or Mms (often called simply 'moment magnitude'). : is a seismic measurement scale used by seismologists to measure the size of earthquakes in terms of energy released, developed in the 1970s as an update of the Richter scale, with which it is often confused.

"The values ​​obtained were 7.95 and 7.86 respectively, therefore higher than the previously published results", explains Xiaodong Song, one of the authors of the study.

"The first shock was slightly stronger than the second - continues Song - and corresponds to one of the largest earthquakes in over 2,000 years of Turkish history".

These values ​​also indicate that the double shock is the most powerful ever to occur on land.