Mehdi Akhoonzadeh of Iran's University of Tehran said monitoring the ground and the atmosphere for unusual physical and chemical parameters could be part of an early warning system for earthquakes.
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The earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria each measured at least 7.6 on the Richter scale. (Representative image) Press Trust of India New Delhi
A new study has found that abnormally high surface temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations were observed in Turkey days before the two earthquakes that struck the country on February 6, 2023.
Mehdi Akhoonzadeh of Iran's University of Tehran, who analyzed satellite data from Nov. 1, 2022, to Feb. 10, 2023, said monitoring the ground and atmosphere for unusual physical and chemical parameters known as earthquake precursors could be part of an early warning system for earthquakes.
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The two earthquakes, each measuring at least 7.6 on the Richter scale, struck Turkey and Syria about nine hours apart, leaving more than 50,000 dead and making them the deadliest earthquakes in modern history.
While researchers are aware of the precursors to earthquakes, it has so far been difficult to conclusively identify “red flag” patterns that could predict an imminent quake, said the authors of the study published in the Journal of Applied Geodesy.
This is because the interactions between these entities are complex and their variability varies from earthquake to earthquake and region to region, Akhoonzadeh said.
But with every earthquake that researchers analyze using satellite observations, Akhoonzadeh said, patterns are slowly emerging between the precursors to these earthquakes.
In this study, the authors observed anomalous surface temperatures already 12 to 19 days before the earthquake.
Akhunzadeh also found that concentrations of water vapor, methane, ozone, and carbon monoxide in the air were unusually high five to 10 days before the earthquake, while concentrations of electrons and other charged particles (in the ionosphere) were unusually high one to five days before the earthquake.
Various processes have been proposed to explain the unusual phenomena that occur in different layers of the Earth before an earthquake, but none have been conclusively proven, the authors say in their study.
These include “warm gases released by molten fluids that formed inside the Earth before the earthquake” and “pressure in underground rocks activating positive charges that reached the Earth's surface,” the authors write.
Studying these phenomena could pave the way for earthquake early warning systems, but researchers will need to evaluate other earthquakes in the future to understand these patterns more fully, Akhoonzadeh said.
The analysis used data from China's seismological and electromagnetic satellite CSES-01 and the European Space Agency's three-satellite Swarm mission.
