Four earthquakes hit Turkey's Adana and Osmaniye provinces one after another on Sunday afternoon, the country's disaster agency AFAD said. The strongest measured 5.2. So far no one has reported injuries or damage, and crews are checking the area.
All four struck within 24 minutes, between 2:19pm and 2:43pm local time. The first hit at 2:19pm near Saimbeyli in Adana province, magnitude 4.8, at a depth of 7.99km — or 7.9km, according to other data.
Nine minutes later, at 2:28pm, a weaker 3.1 quake hit Sumbas in Osmaniye province, at a depth of 7km. At 2:36pm the ground shook again near Saimbeyli — 17 minutes after the first quake — this time magnitude 4.9, at a depth of 8.67km.
The strongest quake came seven minutes after that. At 2:43pm, a 5.2 quake struck near Sumbas at a depth of 7km. People also felt the tremors in Gaziantep, Kilis, Hatay, Mersin and nearby provinces.
Interior minister Mustafa Çiftçi wrote on social media that AFAD teams and other agencies had started checking the area right away. "So far there is no bad news. Our teams are still at work," he said, wishing those affected a quick recovery.
Environment, urban planning and climate minister Murat Kurum said every report coming in is being checked. "We're closely watching what happens after the earthquakes in Adana and Osmaniye. No bad news has come in so far, but we're checking every report," he said.
Osmaniye governor Mehmet Fatih Serdengeçti contacted local agencies right away to coordinate and said there had been no bad effects so far. Transport minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu said transport and phone networks were working fine.
Earthquake expert professor Şükrü Ersoy said the four quakes hit the same zone, probably along the same fault, with magnitudes close to each other. The series is not on a major fault, he added, but the area has several parallel faults running north to south.
Faults north of Adana could produce quakes above magnitude 6, Ersoy warned. He said monitoring in the area needs to step up, since aftershocks tend to follow a single fault line.
He said there are cases where hundreds of quakes this size happen with no major earthquake coming after them, but the series is still worrying people living there. He said these are tectonic quakes, different from those in western Anatolia, which is why they're felt over such a wide area even though they are not normally destructive.
Ersoy added that the term "foreshock" shouldn't be used, because there's no way to predict the next earthquake. A stronger quake is possible in theory, he said, but no one can say for sure it will happen.
He said the energy that has built up in this zone may be releasing through quakes like these, weaker ones spread over a long time. These are just theories, he said, and the area needs to be watched.