From time to time news spreads about major earthquakes. Just a few weeks ago, an earthquake measuring 7 on the scale struck near the coast of the US state of California, while the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, suffered just one week ago from an earthquake measuring 7.3, and from time to time Another country announces a new earthquake here or there.
This gives the impression that major earthquake activity around the world is increasing, especially since people are hearing about an earthquake hitting their country every few weeks, if not days sometimes. Has the world really become such a dangerous place that earthquakes are occurring more frequently?
This attracts the attention of the promoters of scientific myths and conspiracy theories, and they talk about something big soon, perhaps the end of the world, the approaching planet Nibiru, and that there is a secret, satanic world government that knows that the world is about to end, but does not reveal the secret.
What are earthquakes?
But this is not the case at all, and to understand the idea, let us start with what an earthquake means. If we imagine that the planet Earth is an apple, then the layer of the Earth’s rocky crust is simply the thin crust of the apple, but this crust on Earth is 30 to 70 kilometers thick on the continents. And from 4 to 12 kilometers in the oceans, it differs in another thing from the crust of an apple, which is that it is not a single piece that covers the Earth, but rather consists of a number of pieces called tectonic plates, which overlap, some with Some like paper puzzles, these plates move slowly, or say they swim, several centimeters each year on another layer of Earth located below them, called the mantle.
These tectonic plates move away from each other in places and closer in others, and as the sides of two tectonic plates approach each other in one place, they rub together to create what scientists call a fault. Normally, the edges of the plates slide slowly and smoothly, but sometimes this is not the case, as the plates overlap violently and earthquakes occur.
This happens all the time. In fact, you may not believe it when you know that there are about half a million earthquakes that hit the Earth every year. About 100,000 of these earthquakes can be felt in one way or another, and only 100 can have a harmful effect, as happened in the case of the Türkiye earthquake. The last.
Earthquake statistics over the past 20 years around the world show that on average, the annual earthquake rate has neither increased nor decreased, but rather remains as constant as possible, which is certainly fortunate for humanity.
Why did their number increase?
At this point, you might ask: Why then do I hear about earthquakes in my country more than ever before, and in fact I begin to feel a greater number of earthquakes in my own home?
In fact, there are a number of reasonable answers to these questions, none of which involve anything having to do with the end of the world. One of these answers relates to seismic stations. Their number has increased and the accuracy of scientists’ tools for measuring earthquakes has increased. This means monitoring a greater number of earthquakes, and because these stations usually publish media data, you will consequently hear about the occurrence of a greater number of earthquakes compared to, say, two decades ago. Over time, you would imagine that the number of earthquakes would have increased, but that’s just the accuracy of our devices.
In addition, the world has literally become a small, continuous village in which you can hear about earthquake news coming from almost everywhere, and seismic stations in your country also have pages on social media in which they announce every earthquake they have monitored and mention its precise epicenter and strength.
People in homes usually feel moderate earthquakes, but they ignore this feeling. However, with the spread of earthquake announcements everywhere, everyone has become more experienced because he learned that the tremor he felt several hours ago was an earthquake and was not just dizziness or a feeling of his imagination, and thus We now feel moderate earthquakes better than before, and because we share news via tweets or short posts quickly, we confirm to each other what we felt, and from here a wave of earthquake news begins to spread among millions to billions of individuals.
Add to this another important point related to the number of annual earthquakes. For example, in 2020 the world witnessed about 1,400 earthquakes with a scale greater than 5 degrees, but in 2021 it witnessed 2,200 earthquakes of the same scale. This means, accordingly, that you will feel a greater number of earthquakes, but it does not mean that the number Earthquakes have increased because earthquake rates are not calculated in a year or two, but rather scientists measure them over a long period of time (decades, for example), and here specifically it will become clear that Although some years may have greater seismic activity, the average around the world is largely constant.
This type of misconception related to the increase in the number of earthquakes from one era to another is important for scientists as well. It is known, for example, that large earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 8.0 have struck the Earth at a high rate since 2004, but scientists from a joint international team – in a study published in the journal BNAS analyzed the historical record of earthquakes and found that this increase in heavy seismic activity was most likely due to coincidence, but why do they say it was a coincidence?
This team examined the global frequency of large earthquakes from 1900 to 2011, and found that while the frequency of magnitude 8.0 earthquakes had been high since 2004 (at a rate of about 1.2 to 1.4 earthquakes per year), this increasing rate was not statistically different from normal. On this larger time scale.
Ring of fire
On the other hand, a number of regions around the world are more seismically active than other regions, and here countries such as Turkey appear specifically. We have heard its name in the news more than once over the past years. For example, in October 2020, the country was struck by an earthquake that measured 7.0 degrees and caused… About 100 people died, and in 2011 the country was struck by a stronger earthquake (7.2 magnitude) that caused the death of more than 600 people, and of course we do not forget the catastrophic earthquake in… 2022, which claimed the lives of nearly 50,000 people from Türkiye and Syria.
This also has a scientific reason. We said a moment ago that the meeting of tectonic plates is linked to earthquakes, and here we can conclude that places located close to the meeting of tectonic plates can experience strong earthquakes, because the impact of the earthquake is strongest in the area that is located above the meeting place. Plates.
At that point, let us consider what scientists call the “Ring of Fire” or the “Pacific Belt,” which is not a ring in the understandable sense, but rather a geographic strip about 40,000 kilometers long that resembles the shape of a horseshoe. It witnessed 81% of the world’s major earthquakes, and extends around the ocean. The Pacific, starting from the south of the South American continent through the Peru-Chile Trench, reaching the Central American Trench, and then goes up in North America along the Rocky Mountains to Alaska, then through the Bering Strait to Japan down to the Philippines, Indonesia, and then finally New Zealand.
In addition to the Ring of Fire belt, there is another belt running on land called the “Alpine Belt”, which is a seismic and mountainous belt that extends for more than 15 thousand kilometers along the southern margin of the continents of Asia and Europe, starting from Java and Sumatra, then across the Indochina Peninsula, and from Then the Himalayas and beyond, then the mountains of Iran, the Caucasus, and Anatolia, all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, and even the Atlantic Ocean. This belt is responsible for 17% of the major earthquakes in the world.
The impact of this belt extends to Turkey, which places it in an active seismic zone due to the complex movements between 3 tectonic plates that fate intended for Turkey to fall between. In general, these belts are the reason that we hear about the recurrence of earthquakes in certain areas, so some people think that the rates of earthquakes have increased. rose.
The bottom line, then, is that earthquake rates have not risen to a level that threatens the end of the world, but myth-mongers, as usual, are keen to use every phenomenon that arouses people’s attention and fear for publications that can garner hundreds of thousands of likes and follows. But the matter does not stop there, but extends deeper, as These myths are combined into major conspiracy theories, such that this or that earthquake is the work of evil forces.