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Is Turkey in The Earthquake Risk Zone?

3 min readMar 4, 2020

I completed Bootcamp’s 1st week at Istanbul Data Science Academy. My first Project is EDA(Exploratory Data Analysis) and I chose a data set which name is The Earthquakes in Turkey between 1910–2017.

In the recent years, we saw a lot of earthquakes in Turkey. Sometimes that was lower magnitude but sometimes bigger than usual. Because of that ı prefer to choose this data set primarily. Firstly let me explain yours earthquake and earthquake types.

An earthquake is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth’s lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes are measured by seismograph. The branch of science that studies these events is called seismology.

I had the “MW”( The moment magnitude scale )column in my dataset, At first I found these results:

** Turkey Earthquake Moment(MW)

-4.47

**Total Earthquake (1910–2017)

· 24007

Types of Earthquakes

There are many diverse types of earthquakes: tectonic, volcanic, and explosion. The type of earthquake depends on the area where it occurs and the geological makeup of that region.

(i) The most common ones are the tectonic earthquakes. These are generated due to sliding of rocks along a fault plane. A tectonic earthquake is one that occurs when the earth’s crust breaks due to geological forces on rocks and adjoining plates that cause physical and chemical changes.

(ii) A special class of tectonic earthquake is sometimes recognized as a volcanic earthquake. A volcanic earthquake is an earthquake that results from tectonic forces which occur in conjunction with the volcanic activity. However, these are confined to areas of active volcanoes.

(iii) In the areas of intense mining activity, sometimes the roofs of underground mines collapse causing minor tremors. A collapse earthquake is small earthquakes in underground caverns and mines that are caused by seismic waves produced from the explosion of rock on the surface. These are called collapse earthquakes.

(iv) Ground shaking may also happen due to the explosion of chemical or nuclear devices. Such tremors are called explosion earthquakes. An explosion earthquake is an earthquake that is the result of the detonation of a nuclear and/or chemical device.

The earthquakes that happen in the areas of large reservoirs are referred to as reservoir-induced earthquakes.

As seen in the image, 94% of the earthquakes we lived in are Shallow earthquakes. So, what did I classify this for?

Classification of earthquakes

Slight

Magnitude upto 4.9 on the Richter Scale.

Moderate

Magnitude 5.0 to 6.9

Great

Magnitude 7.0 to 7.9

Very Great

Magnitude 8.0 and more

When I read the studies related to the subject, I saw many deficiencies in the Fault Line section. In my visulization I refer this distinction. The detail here is; We can say to categorize the fault line depth we experienced in the earthquake according to the earthquake intensities.

If you want to see the slide that shows the earthquake and intensity experienced by the relevant provinces, regions and years, you can reach my GitHub account from the link below: https://github.com/eminekayali/earthquake

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