The Earthquake Catalogues for Turkey

Authors: ONUR TAN, M. CENGİZ TAPIRDAMAZ, AHMET YÖRÜK

Abstract: The earthquake data from instrumental records in the last 40 years indicate the general seismicity of the earth. However, examining historical records is necessary to understand long-term seismicity. Catalogue studies about historical earthquakes in Turkey are limited. All these catalogues are on printed paper and a digital database has not yet been prepared. On the other hand, there is no common database for the focal mechanism solutions of the recent destructive earthquakes (Mw>=5.5) in the region. The present study aims to prepare two new digital databases for earth scientists so that the earthquake parameters can be reached from a single source. The first one is `The Historical Earthquake Catalogue of Turkey´ which includes parameters of the earthquakes occurring between 2100 B.C. and 1963 A.D. This database contains approximately 2285 events and is presented as an electronic supplement. The second dataset, `The Focal Mechanism Solutions Catalogue of Turkey´, contains fault plane solution parameters of the destructive earthquakes occurring between 1938 and 2004. All available mechanism solutions of the destructive earthquakes were collected, although the global moment tensor solutions reported via the internet were not included in the present study.

Keywords: Turkey, historical earthquakes, focal mechanism solutions, earthquake catalogue

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