The Turkey-Syria earthquakes
Two earthquakes hours apart kill about 60,000 people, most of them asleep in buildings that should have stood.
- When
- Known to
- ± 30 seconds
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
- Where
- Gaziantep, Turkey · 37.0662° N, 37.3833° E
A magnitude 7.8 struck near Gaziantep at 04:17 on 6 February 2023, followed nine hours later by a 7.5 on a separate fault. More than 55,000 died in Turkey and around 6,000 in a Syria already broken by twelve years of war. Turkey has strict seismic building codes; the death toll was concentrated in buildings that had been granted amnesty from them, and hundreds of developers and officials were later charged.