Monday morning a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook Turkey and surrounding countries, causing thousands of fatalities in Turkey and bordering Syria, tens of thousands of injuries, and thousands of collapsed buildings.
including this one. collide ok, tom, tom bateman, thank you, in the city of iskenderun in southern turkey. this is the most powerful earthquake to hit turkey in almost a century. the epicentre was here in the south close to the city of gaziantep near the border with syria, one of the world s most seismically active regions. that s because turkey sits on the fault line, where three tectonic plates come together. the arabian plate is constantly pushing into the eurasian plate, which squeezes this one, the anatolian plate, to the west. it s moving at about 2cm every year. where the plates grind past each other, more fault lines are created, leading to the earthquake we saw yesterday. our diplomatic correspondent james landale is here. james, we can see from those maps how close the earthquake is to syria, but we re not seeing as much coverage of the destruction there why? that is because syria is still at war, after more than a decade, so
anatolian microplate, and this is moving to the west, this is a block that is moving to the west, the block is bounded to the north by the northern anatolian fault, and this is a very large fault extending across turkey for 1,500 kilometres. it has been having a breaks quite frequently. however, the fault in question we are talking about is the east anatolian fault, and this forms the southern boundary of the anatolian block. and it is adjacent to another fault which is called the dead sea fault, that boundaries the african and anatolian plate. it is tectonic lee a very complex system, where earthquakes are common and the motion of faults is