Two devastating sequential earthquakes of magnitudes M 7.8 (epicenter in the vicinity of Pazarcık county in Kahramanmaraş province) and M 7.6 (epicenter in the vicinity of Elbistan county in Kahramanmaraş province) occurred within approximately 9 hours difference on the southwest part of the Eastern Anatolian Transform Fault Zone (EATFZ). These two earthquakes that constitute one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the Levant, were felt as far as Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, and the Black Sea coast of Turkey. The damage extent, in terms of human lives and civil structures, encompasses an area of about 60,000 km square, reaching as far as 400 km from the epicenters of the two events, including the border settlements in north-western Syria.
The preliminary geological surveys indicate that the first earthquake ruptured a segment of approximately 300 km whereas the Çardak-Sürgü fault branch of the EATFZ was ruptured with a length of approximately 150 km in the second earthquake. The earthquakes heavily damaged eleven provinces of Türkiye (Kahramanmaraş, Adıyaman, Elazığ, Gaziantep, Malatya, Kilis, Hatay, Adana, Diyarbakır, Osmaniye, and Şanlıurfa. As of February 25th 2023, the death toll is 44,218 and almost 550k people have been evacuated from the earthquake struck cities. The number of severely damaged and collapsed buildings are reported as approximately 110k 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 13.5m people in Türkiye have been affected one way or the other from these earthquakes. The region is still seismically active and a total of 9136 aftershocks (largest being M6.4) are recorded after these mainshocks. The accelerograms of the two mainshocks were recorded by over 280 strong motion stations operated by AFAD, the national network operator.
The February 6th Kahramanmaraş earthquakes resulted in significant casualties and economic losses mainly in Türkiye but there are many points related to tectonics, seismology, strong ground motions, structural and earthquake engineering that deserve to be studied in detail. This special issue invites researchers in the fields of earth sciences, engineering seismology, structural and earthquake engineering to submit papers and explain their findings on the below topics for highlighting the most important aspects of the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes in seismology, hazard, loss and structural/geotechnical earthquake engineering.
- Fault kinematics and simulating synthetic ground motions
- Static and dynamic stress triggering
- Seismicity, post seismic activity and aftershock forecasting
- Shallow underground seismic and conductivity imaging of the fault segments ruptured
- Strong-ground motion processing
- Forward directivity pulses and near-fault effects
- Ground-motion models, regional and event-based effects on the estimated ground-motion intensity measures
- Event-based, time-dependent and time-independent probabilistic seismic hazard assessment
- Liquefaction
- Basin effects
- Methods for rapid structural damage/performance assessment and screening of large inventories
- Observed damage characteristics and distributions in reinforced concrete/masonry buildings
- Earthquake performance of health facilities, including seismically isolated hospitals
- Earthquake performance of industrial facilities
- Earthquake performance of lifeline systems (roads, railroads, bridges, tunnels and major pipelines)
- Earthquake performance or electric power and distribution system
- Earthquake performance of urban infrastructure and municipal services
- Insurance portfolio losses in terms of structural damage and financial losses
