Turkey and Northern Syria Hit by Multiple Earthquakes

[Moonface]

Earth's tectonic plates are fickle creatures. Being anywhere near a plate division is just a really scary place to be. You can at least predict hurricanes and other weather events to strike but things of that nature are next to impossible to predict.

Even if we could predict them, would it even be feasible to place a mandatory evac notice to get everyone clear of the area that would be affected? Staying inside is probably always a huge risk in the event of a building collapse, and going outside is only helpful if you can get to an open area where nothing can fall on you which would be very hard to do in cities and dense urban areas.

[Dragon Lord]

Being able to predict them probably wouldn't do much for the overall numbers. Even though we can predict things like Hurricanes, there's still a lot of people that can't get out of the area, or just plain refuse to evacuate regardless of how bad things are supposed to get.

Not to mention that there really isn't much you can do to defend against an earthquake. Hurricanes you can at least try to do some stuff to protect yourself and your home, such as boarding up the windows/sandbagging around your house/etc..

The best they can do is monitor tectonic plate activity and try to notice signs that there might be a major shift happening at some point in the near future, but then you have no idea of knowing what exactly that would be anyways.

[Moonface]

The best they can do is monitor tectonic plate activity and try to notice signs that there might be a major shift happening at some point in the near future, but then you have no idea of knowing what exactly that would be anyways.

Yeah, and I don't know if we'd even be able to determine what scale the earthquake would be. Knowing the plates are moving doesn't present the same degree of predictability we can have with weather patterns, and it would probably have to be so close to the actual event to know the magnitude range that it would be too late to get people to safe areas.

For me, if there was never any way of knowing what magnitude an earthquake could be I don't know if I'd want to know up front one is coming or not. I think I'd rather just live in an area where as much preparation and measures have been taken as possible as the standard way to do things and hope that stuff has advanced enough to protect against anything extremely well, rather than spend my days in anxiety wondering when the earthquake will actually hit and how hard.

[Dragon Lord]

Living in the north central US is great for the fact that the only weather I have to worry about is the low chance of a tornado in the summer, or a blizzard during the winter. Don't have to worry about earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc..

Maybe some day in the far future they'll be able to develop some kind of equipment that could read the plate activity and give accurate predictions as to what may happen, but that day is probably far, far off in the future.

[ShiraNoMai]

I mean, earthquake engineering is a thing. They check things like seismic loading (testing excitation upon structures), seismic performance (how well the structure is sustaining itself during and post quake) and seismic vibration control (things to help mitigate the effects of a quake). It's been in the works for at least a few decades now. Some things can be retrofit to reinforce structural integrity based on the type of construction the building was built under (adobe, limestone, wooden framed structures).

Seismometers (the things that detect seismic activity) have been a thing since ancient times. The most modern ones use fiber optics (as of 2016?) and work as such:

The point of the cable first disturbed by an earthquake's p-wave (essentially a sound wave in rock) can be determined by sending packets in both directions in the looped pair of optical fibers; the difference in the arrival times of the first pair of perturbed packets indicates the distance along the cable. This point is also the point closest to the earthquake's epicenter, which should be on a plane perpendicular to the cable. The difference between the p-wave/s-wave arrival times provides a distance (under ideal conditions), constraining the epicenter to a circle. A second detection on a non-parallel cable is needed to resolve the ambiguity of the resulting solution. Additional observations constrain the location of the earthquake's epicenter, and may resolve the depth.

[Moonface]

I mean, earthquake engineering is a thing. They check things like seismic loading (testing excitation upon structures), seismic performance (how well the structure is sustaining itself during and post quake) and seismic vibration control (things to help mitigate the effects of a quake). It's been in the works for at least a few decades now. Some things can be retrofit to reinforce structural integrity based on the type of construction the building was built under (adobe, limestone, wooden framed structures).

The lack of this plus the unfinished state of so many buildings is really what drove up the numbers of the earthquake this thread is focused on. An earlier post of mine linked to an article showing that California might not even top 2000 casualties even if the San Andreas fault were to rip the place in two due to how much earthquake engineering has already been done there.

My issue that I brought up in my last post is that even knowing practically every measure for safety possible has been implemented in somewhere like California, I wouldn't want to know an earthquake is coming if it can't be accurately predicted when it will hit and how hard. Imagine if Florida just got told "Yeah there's a hurricane coming" but with no concrete idea of when it will land and how strong it'll be; yeah, my house might be kitted out to withstand it but I'd still dislike the unknown nature of when I'm getting hit. XD