I was following the events of smaller earthquakes happening in Turkey yesterday evening, went to bed, and woke up to my house shaking in the greater Buffalo area. Then not even a few hours later here of another massive earthquake in Syria.
Now I know The United States Geological Survey has stated that there is no correlation and, obviously, coincidence is very possible…but I can’t **shake** this feeling that the two could be related. Can anybody explain why they *are not* related? Thanks!
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Between the East Anatolian fault zone and the North American Craton, there’s a lot of squishy rock.
Well, rock isn’t very squishy relative to other materials. But when you add up that small amount of squishiness over many millions of meters distance, there’s more than enough to isolate the slipping that results from an earthquake.
They’re all connected the same way that a storm in Korea might influence a later one in Norway – the effect is too small and too chaotic to be measured.
Nearby earthquakes are related, though. The displacement of one fault line can encourage another one to slip. This happens because they are close enough to be stiffly connected.
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