IGPP Geophysics Professor Yuri Fialko and Seismologist Zhe Jia spoke with KPBS on August 7 regarding their recent findings in the journal Science.
Fialko and Jia have been studying the devastating Earthquake doublet that occurred in Turkey February 2023—where earthquakes jumped from the Branch fault to Anatolian fault. Given the Anatolian fault structure's similarities to the San Andreas fault in age, displacement, length, and slip-rate, there are lessons for Californians to gain from this occurrence.
"When a certain fault segment ruptures," Jia explained, "it will communicate with other faults and develop stress permutations that make other faults rupture one by one...in this process, the earthquake will grow in size and length and turn into a devastating size.” What surprised Fialko and Jia about the Turkey earthquakes, was that in addition to the earthquake jumping from one fault to another, it jumped “and started propagating in both directions along the fault line.”
The full Science article is available here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi0685 (additional IGPP authors include Zeyu Jin, Alice-Agnes Gabriel, Wenyuan Fan, Peter Shearer, Xiaoyu Zou, John Rekoske)
KPBS story here: https://www.kpbs.org/news/science-technology/2023/08/07/study-shows-california-can-learn-from-turkeys-devastating-earthquake