The key earthquake and enormous aftershock in Turkey on Monday are two of greater than 70 quakes of magnitude 6.5 or greater recorded within the area since 1900. Turkey’s two major fault zones — the East Anatolian and the North Anatolian — make it one of the crucial seismically energetic areas on this planet.

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake at 4:17 a.m. native time, and the unusually giant 7.5-magnitude aftershock 9 hours later, each have been within the East Anatolian Fault Zone. However there have been a number of extraordinarily lethal quakes within the North Anatolian Fault Zones as properly, together with one in 1999 about 60 miles from Istanbul that killed about 17,000 folks.

These fault zones are a results of motion of enormous parts of Earth’s crust, or tectonic plates, relative to one another. One zone contains the Anatolian Plate, which makes up most of Turkey. The East Anatolian zone encompasses the world the place there’s motion of the Anatolian Plate relative to the Arabian Plate to the southeast. The North Anatolian zone is the place there’s motion of the Anatolian Plate and the Eurasian Plate to the north.

The primary quake on Monday was one of the crucial highly effective earthquakes ever recorded within the space, matching the magnitude of a earthquake that killed about 30,000 folks in December 1939 in northeast Turkey.