Early Monday morning, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake ripped by way of Turkey and Syria, adopted 9 hours later by a 7.5 aftershock. The demise toll stands at greater than 3,800, and rescuers have solely simply begun to comb by way of the collapsed buildings. 

Aftershocks will proceed to shake the world as native faults modify to such an enormous preliminary tremor, and scientists say that course of may proceed for not simply days however months and even years. There’s even an opportunity—albeit a small one—of an aftershock larger than the unique quake. 

“The aftershock threat is best, basically, proper after the mainshock, however there will probably be noticeable aftershocks to this earthquake for years afterward,” says David Oglesby, a geophysicist at UC Riverside. “Proper now, I can forecast for you that there will probably be many extra aftershocks of magnitude 5, most likely 6 or so, on this space. That is a simple name to make, as a result of traditionally talking, statistically talking, that is virtually assured.”

That can flip a humanitarian disaster in Turkey and Syria into one thing much more terrible. “We won’t say to folks: OK, it is good, you are executed. That was horrible, and it is over now. As a result of that is simply not how the earth works,” says earthquake geologist Wendy Bohon. “It simply actually sucks to know that these individuals are going to should proceed to really feel shaking from earthquakes for a very long time, after they have been so traumatized and gone by way of such a devastating expertise.”

Earthquakes are merchandise of plate tectonics: Plates are nice lots of rock that transfer independently within the earth’s crust, however contact one another alongside faults. “Finally, the stress and pressure goes to beat the friction that’s holding the rocks collectively, and people rocks are going to interrupt in an earthquake,” says Bohon. “When the rocks break, they launch power within the type of waves, and people waves are what we really feel as shaking.”

The mainshock Monday morning struck alongside some 125 miles of the East Anatolian Fault, a well known fault line in southern Turkey. Particularly, this was a strike-slip earthquake, which means stress constructed up between two lots of rock shifting horizontally in reverse instructions till the fault ruptured. It was additionally very shallow underground, which means it created extra intense shaking on the floor. (The San Andreas Fault in California can be a strike-slip fault—that was the one which destroyed a lot of San Francisco in 1906.)

Typically talking, the bigger the mainshock, the bigger the aftershocks, which are likely to lower in frequency and severity as time goes on. As you may see in this map, aftershocks of assorted intensities have been swarming alongside the unique quake’s fault line in addition to at a unique however linked fault line to the north, the place the magnitude 7.5 aftershock appears to have hit. “It is a actually sophisticated system of faults, for the reason that crust is de facto crushed there,” says Alice Gabriel, a seismologist on the Scripps Establishment of Oceanography.

That complexity implies that what occurs in a single fault doesn’t keep there. It might have been that the stress that led to the 7.5 quake had been constructing for a while, and the jolt from the mainshock unleashed it. “It form of superior its clock a bit, in order that it had the big earthquake that it will have ultimately anyway, most likely a bit sooner,” says Austin Elliott, an earthquake geologist at america Geological Survey. Such aftershocks are “simply merely different earthquakes—there’s nothing that makes them distinct. It is simply that an earthquake so massive modifications the stress within the earth’s crust so considerably that it will increase the speed of all different earthquakes regionally.”