Türkiye’s earthquake history on a map

Most of Türkiye sits on the Anatolian plate, a block squeezed between the Arabian plate pushing north and the Eurasian plate, and forced out to the west. Two great faults take most of that movement: the North Anatolian Fault, running more than 1,000 km across the north to the Sea of Marmara, and the East Anatolian Fault in the south-east. The Aegean west, around İzmir, is slowly being pulled apart, and shakes too.

From 1939 a run of large quakes broke the North Anatolian Fault section by section, moving broadly west: Erzincan in 1939, Niksar–Erbaa in 1942, Tosya–Ladik in 1943 and Bolu–Gerede in 1944, then, much later, İzmit and Düzce in 1999. The next section west lies under the Sea of Marmara, close to Istanbul.

TAKIP’s History view draws NOAA’s list of significant earthquakes, kept by its National Centers for Environmental Information. A quake makes the list if it killed people, did moderate damage (about $1 million or more), reached magnitude 7.5, shook at intensity X or more, or caused a tsunami. It is a list of the quakes that mattered, not of every quake.

In the copy TAKIP holds, NOAA files 162 quakes under Turkey in the 100 years to October 2026, 16 of them of magnitude 7 or more, and 22 in the last ten years. The country’s list runs back more than 2,000 years, with 359 entries in all, though places and sizes before about 1900 are estimates worked out from the damage.

The strongest of the last century, at magnitude 7.8 in NOAA’s list, were Erzincan in December 1939 and the Kahramanmaraş quake of 6 February 2023. The 2023 shock was followed later the same day by a second, of magnitude 7.5, further north. NOAA’s record for the first, which lists places in both Türkiye and Syria, gives 56,697 deaths, the highest of any entry in the century.

NOAA counts 32,700 deaths at Erzincan, and 17,118 at İzmit, where a magnitude 7.6 quake struck on 17 August 1999. Further back, the record holds ancient Antioch, today’s Antakya, wrecked again and again in Roman and Byzantine times; NOAA’s tolls for those run to hundreds of thousands, and are rough estimates.

Each place below opens the live map there, with today’s quakes.

The live earthquakes layer marks every quake of magnitude 2.5 or more in the last 24 hours, from USGS and from EMSC, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, whose catalogue is strongest in Europe and the Mediterranean. History draws the long record, each quake appearing as the clock reaches it.

NOAA’s list leaves out quakes that did little harm, so it shows where Türkiye was hurt, not how often the ground moves. The counts follow the country NOAA files each quake under, and a quake near a border can be filed under the neighbour.

Magnitudes and death tolls are NOAA’s; other agencies and later studies can differ, and the older the entry, the rougher it is. On the live layer, the first magnitude is often revised within the hour. The live layers pause while History is open.