Anatomy of an earthquake sequence: 465 events of M4+ in the thirty days after 6 February.
At 04:17 local time on 6 February 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake broke the East Anatolian Fault near Pazarcık. Nine hours later a second, magnitude 7.5 rupture followed on the Çardak fault to the north. Together they released more energy than any earthquake in Türkiye's instrumental record.
This story walks through the sequence as it appears in the USGS catalog: every event of magnitude 4 or larger, for thirty days.
The first rupture started near Pazarcık, southeast of Kahramanmaraş, and propagated in both directions along the fault for more than 300 km. Shaking was felt from Cairo to Baku.
On the map, the largest circle marks the M7.8 epicentre. Circle size scales with magnitude; colour deepens with depth.
At 13:24 the Çardak–Sürgü fault system, roughly 90 km north, produced a magnitude 7.5 event near Elbistan. Two ruptures of this size within hours is extremely rare; the second is treated as a triggered mainshock, not an aftershock.
Aftershocks trace the geometry of the rupture. Within a week, hundreds of M4+ events outlined a 350-kilometre corridor from Hatay in the south to Malatya in the northeast, with a second cluster along the Çardak fault.
Filtering to the first seven days shows the corridor clearly.
The southern end of the rupture reached Hatay, where Antakya suffered some of the most concentrated destruction. On 20 February two more strong events, M6.3 and M5.8, struck near Defne and Samandağ, two weeks into the sequence.
By early March the rate of M4+ events had fallen from dozens a day to a handful. The sequence was not over — aftershocks continued for months — but the catalog already told the shape of the event: two faults, one corridor, thirty days.
Explore the data yourself: the dashboard version of this project updates from the USGS live feed.