A Rosetta Stone for Earthquakes

Istanbul, a city of 14 million people and a crossroads of cultural exchange dating back millennia, may also be where Turkey's next major earthquake strikes. Cities along the North Anatolian Fault, which stretches from eastern Turkey to the Aegean Sea, have experienced an advancing series of strong quakes during the past 80 years, beginning in 1939 when a devastating 7.8-magnitude rupture leveled the city of Erzincan and killed 33,000 people. Most recently, in 1999, 7.4-magnitude quake near the city of İzmit left 17,000 dead and half a million homeless. A few months later, another shock hit Düzce, 60 miles away. Brendan Meade, an applied computational scientist and associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, recently built a computer model of conditions in the North Anatolian Fault.