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Special Issue: February 6, 2023, Kahramanmaraş-Türkiye Earthquakes (M7.7 and 7.6): Reconnaissance Missions and First Observations

Submission status
Closed

The February 6, 2023, Kahramanmaras-Turkiye earthquakes have caused significant damage and loss of life in the region. The damage extent, in terms of human lives and civil structures, encompasses an area of about 60,000 km2, reaching as far as 450 km from the epicenters of the two events, including the border settlements in northwestern Syria. Two devastating sequential earthquakes of magnitudes M 7.7 (epicenter in the vicinity of Pazarcık county in Kahramanmaraş province) and M 7.6 (epicenter in the vicinity of Ekinözü-Elbistan county in Kahramanmaraş province) occurred within approximately 9 hours difference on the southwest part of the Eastern Anatolian Transform Fault Zone (EATFZ). The earthquakes heavily damaged eleven provinces of Türkiye (Kahramanmaraş, Adıyaman, Elazığ, Gaziantep, Malatya, Kilis, Hatay, Adana, Diyarbakır, Osmaniye, and Şanlıurfa. As of March 9, 2023, the death toll exceeded 45,000 and almost 600k people have been evacuated from the earthquake-struck cities. The number of severely damaged and collapsed buildings are reported as approximately 250k in the eleven provinces. The city centers of Antakya (Antioch, one of the most ancient cities in the Middle East), as well as Adıyaman and Kahramanmaraş are almost completely demolished. The official reports indicate approximately 15m people have been affected by these earthquakes. The accelerograms of the two mainshocks were recorded by over 280 strong motion stations operated by AFAD, the national network operator, and other structure- and basin-specific strong motion networks.

As a consequence, there exist many issues related to tectonics, seismology, strong ground motions, and earthquake engineering that deserve to be studied in detail. This special issue will invite researchers in the fields of earth sciences, engineering seismology, soil dynamics, and earthquake engineering to publish papers and explain their findings on the below topics (and possibly others) for highlighting the most important aspects of these earthquakes:

• Geotechnical and structural damage assessments

• Strong-ground motion processing and analysis

• Forward directivity pulses and near-fault effects

• Ground-motion models

• Liquefaction

• Basin effects

• Earthquake performance of lifeline systems (roads, railroads, dams, bridges, tunnels, and major pipelines)

• Earthquake performance of urban infrastructure and municipal services

• Emergency response and recovery efforts

• Social and economic impacts of the earthquakes

Editors

  • Kemal Önder Çetin Kemal Önder Çetin , 

    Kemal Önder Çetin

    Middle East Technical University Civil Engineering Department Dumlupinar Blv. Çankaya Ankara 06800, Turkey e-mail: ocetin@metu.edu.tr

  • Robb E. S. Moss Robb E. S. Moss  &

    Robb E. S. Moss

    California Polytechnic State University College of Engineering San Luis Obispo, 93407 CA, USA

  • Ahmet Yakut Ahmet Yakut

    Ahmet Yakut

    Middle East Technical University Civil Engineering Department Dumlupinar Blv. Çankaya Ankara 06800, Turkey

Articles (7 in this collection)