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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Big Slow-Moving Earthquake South of Istanbul [gfz-potsdam.de]:

The quake happened so slowly that only special processing methods applied to data from borehole strainmeters were able to detect it.

A big earthquake occurred south of Istanbul in the summer of 2016, but it was so slow that nobody noticed. The earthquake, which took place at mid-crustal depth, lasted more than fifty days.

[...] The study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters reports on a large 2-month lasting ultra-slow earthquake that occurred south of Istanbul below the Sea of Marmara in conjunction with elevated moderate-sized seismicity at shallow depth in the region. The researchers investigated the crustal deformation data from borehole instruments installed around the eastern Sea of Marmara as part of the GONAF Plate Boundary Observatory.

Data from one of the borehole strainmeter stations located in the most seismically active portion of the area on the Armutlu Peninsula was processed using novel computing techniques. 'This allowed to identify the slow slip signal that presumably occurred at mid-crustal depth level and that is of the same size as the largest ever seen such signal that occurred along the San Andreas Fault in California', says Dr. Martínez-Garzón, lead-author of the study.

Should have noticed from all the snails saying "Wheeee!" =)

Journal Reference:

Patricia Martínez-Garzón, Marco Bohnhoff, David Mencin, Grzegorz Kwiatek, Georg Dresen, Kathleen Hodgkinson, Murat Nurlu, Filiz Tuba Kadirioglu, Recai Feyiz Kartal. Slow strain release along the eastern Marmara region offshore Istanbul in conjunction with enhanced local seismic moment release. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2019; 510: 209 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2019.01.001 [doi.org]

Original Submission