Residents Panic as Quake Strikes Hindu Kush Region; No Casualties Reported
Late on Saturday evening, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 struck the Hindu Kush Region in Afghanistan, sending tremors across parts of Delhi-NCR, Jammu and Kashmir, and the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The National Center for Seismology (NCS) located the epicenter at Latitude 36.38 and Longitude 70.77, at a depth of 181 km.
The impact of the quake was felt in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri, Srinagar, Gulmarg, and in Pakistan’s cities, including Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and Peshawar.
Fearing for their safety, residents rushed out of their homes in panic following the tremor.
The Hindu Kush mountain range, situated near the convergence of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, is known for frequent seismic activity, making Afghanistan susceptible to earthquakes.
Thankfully, despite the intensity of the quake, no damages or casualties have been reported so far. Earlier on the same day, Jammu and Kashmir had already experienced two other earthquakes, one in Pakistan at 8:36 am and another in the Hindu Kush region at 10:24 am.
These earlier quakes had magnitudes of 5.2 and 4.3, respectively, but did not cause any harm.
Authorities are urging residents to remain vigilant and follow safety protocols during such occurrences to ensure their well-being.
Honiara [Solomon Islands], May 28 (ANI): A Earthquake of size 5.6 hit the Solomon Islands on Sunday, as per the US Land Overview (USGS).
The Solomon Islands, situated in the southwestern Pacific Sea, encountered a huge seismic tremor estimating 5.6 on the Richter scale. The seismic occasion happened on Sunday at around 08:59:55 (UTC+05:30) and was recorded by the USGS.
Tremor Subtleties: Time, Profundity, and Focal point
The tremor had a profundity of 103.9 km, demonstrating an impressive distance underneath the World’s surface. The USGS pinpointed the focal point at organizes 10.149 degrees S and 161.194 degrees E.
Solomon Islands: An Archipelago in the Pacific Sea
The Solomon Islands, comprising of six significant islands and north of 900 more modest islands, are arranged in Oceania. The archipelago is found east of Papua New Guinea and northwest of Vanuatu in the southwestern Pacific Sea. The country’s biggest island is Guadalcanal, home to the capital city, Honiara.
Honiara: Capital City of the Solomon Islands
Honiara, situated on Guadalcanal, fills in as the capital city of the Solomon Islands. As the biggest metropolitan community in the country, it is a center point for government exercises, trade, and far-reaching developments. The city is known for its picturesque excellence, with staggering scenes and an energetic nearby culture.
This tremor fills in as a sign of the district’s land action, as the Pacific Ring of Fire is known for its seismic and volcanic occasions. While no reports of harm or setbacks have been gotten up to this point, specialists are observing the circumstance intently.
As seismic occasions can be flighty, it is pivotal for occupants and guests in the Solomon Islands to remain informed and keep any security rules given by nearby specialists.
Istanbul: With many public buildings still damaged across Turkey’s 11 southern provinces following devastating twin earthquakes on February 6, special containers have been set up to facilitate voting on Sunday’s presidential elections.
The custom-made 21 sq mt containers will house two voting booths on the back corners for earthquake victims to vote in privacy, while election officials will be seated in the middle to monitor the process, Xinhua news agency reported.
Multiple firms in the quake-hit southern province of Gaziantep are manufacturing the special containers that are also sent to nearby provinces of Hatay, Kahramanmaras, Adiyaman, and Malatya, local media reported.
“We were normally producing containers for living when new demand for the election came up,” Ahmet Yirtici, owner of one of the manufacturing firms, told the state-run Anadolu Agency.
His company was commissioned to produce 1,000 containers.
“To meet this demand, we had to increase our workload to three shifts across 24 hours,” Yirtici said.
Following the elections, the containers will be converted into residences.
Dozens of containers have already been set up at school yards around Kahramanmaras province, the epicentre of the deadly earthquakes which claimed nearly 51,000 lives. Meanwhile, Hatay province, one of the worst hit by the disaster, has had 167 containers set up at schools and outside neighborhood administrators’ offices.
Flights to the Hatay airport have been canceled due to safety considerations until May 17, three days after the elections, Hatay Mayor Lutfu Savas recently told reporters. The airport was severely damaged during the earthquake but had been temporarily open for a while.
Of the 60.7 million eligible voters in Turkey, nine million reside in provinces hit by the earthquake. With many people fleeing to other cities, it is difficult to determine precisely how many have shifted their registration and how many will return to vote, and the lack of airport access might reduce voter turnout.
The presidential elections will be a tight race between two of four candidates: Incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seeking a new five-year term following two consecutive terms, and challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who is running as the candidate for an alliance of opposition parties.
Both candidates are also campaigning on promises of improving the quality of life for many Turks affected by the recent economic downturn. If no candidate secures more than 50 percent of the votes in the first round, a second round will be held on May 28.
Meanwhile, 24 parties are running for the concurrent parliamentary election, according to Supreme Election Board (YSK), many of which have formed alliances. The ruling Justice and Development Party’s People’s Alliance and the leading opposition Republican People’s Party’s Nation Alliance are the two main blocs.
The election also boasts major symbolic significance, with 2023 being the centennial of the founding of the republic, Xinhua news agency reported.
Srinagar, May 08: Jammu and Kashmir was jolted by an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale, causing panic among the people who rushed out of their workplaces and homes in fear.
The quake hit the region at around 2:28 pm on Monday.
According to reports, the tremors were felt in many parts of the country, including Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi, as well as in neighbouring country Pakistan.
The quake lasted for several seconds, and people reported feeling their buildings shake.
There have been no reports of any casualties or damage to property at the time of writing, but the quake has caused anxiety among the people, many of whom are still reeling from the devastating earthquake that hit the region in 2005.
The earthquake has once again highlighted the need for preparedness and awareness among people in earthquake-prone areas.
It is important for people to be aware of the steps they can take to minimize the impact of earthquakes and to be prepared for emergencies.
University of Washington professor of seismology and geohazards Harold Tobin who also heads the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, explains the differences between predicting and forecasting earthquakes
An aerial view of the devastation by the February 2023 earthquake in Hatay, Turkey.
In short, no. Science has not yet found a way to make actionable earthquake predictions. A useful prediction would specify a time, a place and a magnitude – and all of these would need to be fairly specific, with enough advance notice to be worthwhile.
For example, if I predict that California will have an earthquake in 2023, that would certainly come true, but it’s not useful because California has many small earthquakes every day. Or imagine I predict a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake will strike in the Pacific Northwest. That is almost certainly true but doesn’t specify when, so it’s not helpful new information.
Earthquakes happen because the slow and steady motions of tectonic plates cause stresses to build up along faults in the Earth’s crust. Faults are not really lines, but planes extending down miles into the ground. Friction due to the enormous pressure from the weight of all the overlying rock holds these cracks together.
An earthquake starts in some small spot on the fault where the stress overcomes the friction. The two sides slip past each other, with the rupture spreading out at a mile or two per second. The grinding of the two sides against each other on the fault plane sends out waves of motion of the rock in every direction. Like the ripples in a pond after you drop in a stone, it’s those waves that make the ground shake and cause damage.
Most earthquakes strike without warning because the faults are stuck – locked up and stationary despite the strain of the moving plates around them, and therefore silent until that rupture begins. Seismologists have not yet found any reliable signal to measure before that initial break.
What about the likelihood of a quake in one area?
On the other hand, earthquake science today has come a long way in what I’ll call forecasting as opposed to prediction.
Seismologists can measure the movement of the plates with millimetre-scale precision using GPS technology and other means, and detect the places where stress is building up. Scientists know about the recorded history of past earthquakes and can even infer farther back in time using the methods of paleo-seismology: the geologically preserved evidence of past quakes.
Putting all this information together allows us to recognize areas where conditions are ripe for a fault to break. These forecasts are expressed as the likelihood of an earthquake of a given size or greater in a region over a period of decades into the future. For example, the US Geological Survey estimates the odds of a magnitude 6.7 or greater quake in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next 30 years is 72 per cent.
Are there any hints a quake could be coming?
A meme that somebody set on social media after the September 22, 2020 evening tremors and it moved faster than the earthquake.
Only about 1 in 20 damaging earthquakes have foreshocks – smaller quakes that precede a larger one in the same place. By definition, they aren’t foreshocks, though, until a bigger one follows. The inability to recognize whether an earthquake in isolation is a foreshock is a big part of why useful prediction still eludes us.
However, in the past decade or so, there have been a number of massive earthquakes of magnitude 8 or more, including the 2011 magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan and a 2014 magnitude 8.1 in Chile. Interestingly, a larger fraction of those very biggest earthquakes seem to have exhibited some precursory events, either in the form of a series of foreshocks detected by seismometers or sped-up movements of the nearby Earth’s crust detected by GPS stations, called “slow slip events” by earthquake scientists.
These observations suggest that perhaps there really are precursory signals for at least some huge quakes. Maybe the sheer size of the ensuing quake made otherwise imperceptible changes in the region of the fault prior to the main event more detectable. We don’t know, because so few of these greater-than-magnitude-8 earthquakes happen. Scientists don’t have a lot of examples to go on that would let us test hypotheses with statistical methods.
In fact, while earthquake scientists all agree that we can’t predict quakes today, there are now essentially two camps: In one view, earthquakes are the result of complex cascades of tiny effects – a sensitive chain reaction of sorts that starts with the proverbial butterfly wing flapping deep within a fault – so they’re inherently unpredictable and will always remain so. On the other hand, some geophysicists believe we may one day unlock the key to prediction if we can just find the right signals to measure and gain enough experience.
How do early warning systems work?
One real breakthrough today is that scientists have developed earthquake early warning systems like the USGS ShakeAlert now operating in California, Oregon and Washington State. These systems can send out an alert to residents’ mobile devices and to operators of critical machinery, including utilities, hospitals, trains and so on, providing warning of anywhere from a few seconds to more than a minute before shaking begins.
This sounds like an earthquake prediction, but it is not. Earthquake early-warning relies on networks of seismometers that detect the very beginning of an earthquake on a fault and automatically calculate its location and magnitude before the damaging waves have spread very far. The sensing, calculating and data transfer all happen near the speed of light, while the seismic waves move more slowly. That time difference is what allows early warning.
For example, if an earthquake begins off the coast of Washington state beneath the ocean, coastal stations can detect it, and cities like Portland and Seattle could get tens of seconds of warning time. People may well get enough time to take a life safety action like “Drop, Cover and Hold On” – as long as they are sufficiently far away from the fault itself.
What complications would predicting bring?
While earthquake prediction has often been referred to as the “holy grail” of seismology, it actually would present some real dilemmas if ever developed.
First of all, earthquakes are so infrequent that any early methods will inevitably be of uncertain accuracy. In the face of that uncertainty, who will make the call to take a major action, such as evacuating an entire city or region? How long should people stay away if a quake doesn’t materialize? How many times before it’s a boy-who-cried-wolf situation and the public stops heeding the orders? How do officials balance the known risks from the chaos of mass evacuation against the risk from the shaking itself? The idea that prediction technology will emerge fully formed and reliable is a mirage.
It is often said in the field of seismology that earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do. Scientists are already good enough today at forecasting earthquake hazards that the best course of action is to redouble efforts to construct or retrofit buildings, bridges and other infrastructure so they’re safe and resilient in the event of ground shaking in any area known to be at risk from large future quakes. These precautions will pay off in lives and property saved far more than a hoped-for means of earthquake prediction, at least for the foreseeable future.
(The author is Professor of Seismology and Geohazards, University of Washington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.)
Jakarta: A 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia’s western province of West Sumatra early Tuesday and was potential of triggering a tsunami, the meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency said.
The earthquake happened at 03:00 a.m. Tuesday Jakarta Time (2000 GMT Monday), with the epicenter at 177 km northwest in Mentawai Islands district and a depth of 84 km under the seabed, Xinhua news agency reported.
A tsunami warning has been put in place by the agency, as the tremors of the quake have the potential of triggering giant waves.
SRINAGAR: According to the National Center for Seismology, a 4.0 magnitude earthquake hit Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday morning. The earthquake occurred at 10:10:51 IST, with a depth of 10 kilometers, a longitude of 73.60, and a latitude of 34.44.
Hyderabad: The relief material collected by Indian citizens for the victims of the earthquake in the Kingdom of Syria has not reached the country as a result of international sanctions imposed on Syria and the permissions required by the Syrian embassy for the departure of aid are awaited, Syrian diplomatic sources said.
It has been decided by the diplomatic authorities that along with the receipt of permits, containers will be sent to Latakia port Syria through Mumbai port and all the items collected by the embassy in different states of the country including Hyderabad will be sent.
The devastating February 6 earthquakes that killed over 57,300 people in the two neighbouring nations of Syria and Turkiye.
Syrian journalist Vayil Odad, who lives in Delhi, said that Indian citizens have ensured generous assistance for the citizens of Syria suffering from various problems and arrangements are being made for the departure of the items received as early as possible.
He said that due to international sanctions, Syria is not only facing a war situation, but on many other fronts, the country is facing difficulties and, in this situation, the embassy also needs cooperation to transport goods from Mumbai port to Latakia port.
The Siasat Daily arranged a relief collection counter for the earthquake victims of Syria in the under-construction building adjacent to the Haj House building in Hyderabad city and collected good amount of relief for the country and during the collection of goods, it was strictly emphasized that old and used clothes should not be sent, but despite this, some irresponsible people sent not only used but also unusable clothes. Videos of cartoons opened for the purpose of isolating them are being circulated on social media. However, only after the complete verification of the goods, these items will be despatched from Mumbai port to Latakia port.
Ankara: Turkey’s Mediterranean coast is expected to see a large number of tourists flowing in this summer despite the devastating earthquakes in February, industry professionals have said.
As temperatures rise, “Turkish Riviera”, the southern part of the country famed for its Turquoise coast and ancient heritage sites, is entering the start of its peak tourism season, Xinhua news agency reported.
Sector representatives reported a decline in reservations following the deadly February 6 earthquakes in the southeastern parts of Turkey, but things soon returned to normal, they said.
“Last year’s favorable data on foreign arrivals and revenues have given us hope this year at the start of the summer season,” Burhan Sili, chair of the Alanya Touristic Hoteliers Association, told the news agency in a recent interview.
Turkey’s tourism income in 2022 saw an all-time high, jumping to $46.3 billion with 51 million foreign visitors, the country’s statistical authority announced in January.
Sili said that demand dropped in the aftermath of the devastating tremors but then picked up in a couple of weeks, making a full recovery.
Alanya, a main tourist destination on the Mediterranean coast, saw a 55-percent increase in foreign tourist arrivals in the first three months of this year compared to the same period last year, according to figures released by the local governorate in early April.
Sili said the tourists from Russia and the European countries, especially Germany and Britain, will make up a large share of the arrivals.
“Overall, we estimate that we will close the 2023 season with a better performance than 2022 in terms of the number of arrivals and revenues,” Sili added.
Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said in January that foreign arrivals are expected to reach 60 million in 2023, before hitting $90 million in 2028, while the income will reach $56 billion this year and $100 billion in five years.
The sharp depreciation of the Turkish currency against hard currencies since the start of 2022 has also made Turkiye an affordable destination for European nationals that are witnessing a rising cost of living.
Kaan Sahinalp, the Turkey representative of German travel giant TUI, was also upbeat about the 2023 outlook, indicating that the country is in for a better year than 2022.
Sahinalp pointed out that the weak lira generally favours foreign travelers on a budget and that Turkey is likely to be once again one of the top choices for many foreigners.
The tourism sector plays an important part in the country’s economy, which saw a widening current account deficit in recent years. The industry also provides the livelihood of over two million people in the country.
