As the magnitude 7.8 quake rippled through Turkey and Syria, followed by a dozen aftershocks including a 7.5 tremor caused destruction on a large-scale and claimed over 24,000 deaths till now, satellite images have captured the havoc that has followed the natural disaster.
In one such instance, UK’s Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET) shows an image of a rupture that stretches over 300-km from the Mediterranean Sea’s northeastern tip.
COMET took the pre and post images of land in the two nations to show the effect of tremors and the massive destruction caused by them. The agency has compared its images by the European Earth-observing satellite Sentinel-1.
Compete picture of the two earthquake ruptures now available from the Sentinel-1 descending pass. @CopernicusEU @COMET_databaseImage below is range offsets from pixel tracking. The two ruptures appear not to be connected.Scale of event is horrific – the image is ~250 km across pic.twitter.com/kc7u3k6z3g— NERC COMET (@NERC_COMET) February 10, 2023
The pictures show two fissure images caused by the earthquake. One of them, which is 125 km long opened nearly nine hours after the second tremour took place in the region. The first tremor took place at 4:17 local time on Monday.
“Scale of the event is horrific,” COMET said in a tweet.
“The bigger the earthquake, the bigger the fault and the more it slips. This earthquake fault is one of the longest on record on the continents. Also very unusual to have two such large earthquakes happening within a few hours of each other,” Tim Wright, who is leading the COMET Team told Space.com, according to NDTV.
When did the earthquakes occur?
The magnitude 7.8 quake rippled through both countries early on Monday, toppling entire apartment blocks, wrecking hospitals, and leaving thousands more people injured or homeless.
Monday’s first earthquake struck at 4:17am (0117 GMT) at a depth of about 18 kilometers (11 miles) near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, which is home to around two million people, the US Geological Survey said.
The initial quake was followed by dozens of aftershocks, including a 7.5-magnitude tremor that jolted the region in the middle of search and rescue work on Monday.
Effects of the earthquakes
The UN said that 5.3 million people are now homeless in Syria and are living in tents. The agency also said that at least 870,000 people urgently needed food in the two countries.
The sufferings of those affected by the earthquake in Syria has been exacerbated because they were already suffering due to the ongoing Syrian civil war. Several parts of northwestern Syria were already gripped by the infighting between pro-Assad, government forces and the rebels and the Kurdistan rebels
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