Turkey hit by series of powerful Earthquakes: The science behind it

More than 4000 people died and several hundred were injured after a major earthquake of magnitude 7.8 hit south-central Turkey and Northwest Syria.

What is an Earthquake?

• An earthquake is an intense shaking of the ground caused by movement under the earth’s surface.
• It happens when two blocks of the earth suddenly slip past one another.
• This releases stored-up ‘elastic strain’ energy in the form of seismic waves, which spreads through the earth and cause the shaking of the ground.

What exactly causes Earthquakes?

• As we know, the earth’s outermost surface, crust, is fragmented into tectonic plates.

• The edges of the plates are called plate boundaries, which are made up of faults.
• The tectonic plates constantly move at a slow pace, sliding past one another and bumping into each other.
• As the edges of the plates are quite rough, they get stuck with one another while the rest of the plate keeps moving.
• Earthquake occurs when the plate has moved far enough and the edges unstick on one of the faults.
• The location below the earth’s surface where the earthquake starts is called the hypocenter, and the location directly above it on the surface of the earth is called the epicentre.

How prone is Turkey to Earthquakes?

• Turkey and Syria lie in a seismically active region
• The region where the earthquake has struck lies along a well-known seismic fault line called the Anatolia tectonic block that runs through northern, central, and eastern Turkey.
• It is a seismically active zone — though not as active as, say, the Himalayan region which is one of the most dangerous regions in the world from the perspective of earthquakes.

What makes Turkey a hotbed of seismic activity?

• Turkey is frequently shaken by earthquakes. In 2020 itself, it recorded almost 33,000 earthquakes in the region.
• Turkey is located on the Anatolian tectonic plate, which is wedged between the Eurasian and African plates.
• On the north side, the minor Arabian plate further restricts movement.
• One fault line — the North Anatolian fault (NAF) line, the meeting point of the Eurasian and Anatolian tectonic plates — is known to be “particularly devastating”.
• Then there is the East Anatolian fault line, the tectonic boundary between the Anatolian Plate and the northward-moving Arabian Plate.
• It runs 650 kilometers from eastern Turkey and into the Mediterranean.
• In addition to this, the Aegean Sea Plate, located in the eastern Mediterranean Sea under southern Greece and western Turkey, is also a source of seismic activity in the region.

Where was the earthquake epicentered?

• The centre of the earthquake was centred about 33 km from Gaziantep, around 18 km deep.
• Its effect was felt across West Asia, Northern Africa and South Eastern Europe with residents of Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece, Israel and Egypt also reporting tremors.

Aftermath: Many Aftershocks hits the region

• Aftershocks are a sequence of earthquakes that happen after a larger mainshock on a fault.
• Aftershocks occur near the fault zone where the mainshock rupture occurred and are part of the “readjustment process” after the main slip on the fault.
• While they become less frequent with time, although they can continue for days, weeks, months, or even years for a very large mainshock.

Can earthquakes be predicted?

• An accurate prediction of an earthquake requires some sort of a precursory signal from within the earth that indicates a big quake is on the way.
• Moreover, the signal must occur only before large earthquakes so that it doesn’t indicate every small movement within the earth’s surface.
• Currently, there is no equipment to find such precursors, even if they exist.

India offers assistance

• India is among the 45 countries, which have so far offered assistance to Turkey.
• It’s sending search and rescue teams of the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) and medical teams along with relief material to the West Asian nation.

Bard, Google’s answer to ‘ChatGPT’

Google has finally decided to answer the challenge and threat posed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its AI chatbot, ChatGPT. The search giant confirmed it will soon start public testing for a new AI chatbot of its own called Bard, based on the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Application or LaMDA.

More about the news:

1. Alphabet and Google CEO spoke about how AI-based features would be coming to Google Search as well.
2. It should be noted that so far LaMDA was available in limited testing to select users of the company’s AI Test Kitchen app.

About Bard and its accessibility:

1. Bard is based on LaMDA and Google’s own conversational AI chatbot.
2. It is an “experimental conversational AI service,” and Google will be “opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks. It’s not yet publicly available.
3. Bard “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. It will give in-depth, conversational and essay-style answers just like ChatGPT does right now.

Disadvantages:

1. Running these models also requires significant computing power. For instance, ChatGPT is powered by Microsoft’s Azure Cloud services.
2. The service often runs into errors at times, because too many people are accessing it.

Comparison of Bard with ChatGPT:

1. Bard looks like a limited rollout right now. Google is looking for a lot of feedback at the moment around Bard, so it is hard to say whether it can answer more questions than ChatGPT.
2. Google has also not made clear the amount of knowledge that Bard possesses.
3. ChatGPT knowledge is limited to events till 2021 and it is based on LaMDA.
4. Bard is built on Transformer technology which is also the backbone of ChatGPT and other AI bots.

Transformer technology:

It was pioneered by Google and made open-source in 2017. It is a neural network architecture, which is capable of making predictions based on inputs and is primarily used in natural language processing and computer vision technology.

Why has Google announced Bard r0ight now?

1. The timing of this announcement is critical. It comes as Microsoft is preparing to announce an integration of ChatGPT into its Bing Search engine.
2. ChatGPT in many ways is being called the end of Google Search; given that conversational AI can give long, essay style and sometimes elegant answers to a user’s queries.
3. Google has also announced it plans to bring AI features to search results.

 

NASA-ISRO partnership’s satellite NISAR

Jointly developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), an Earth-observation satellite, called NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), and got a send-off ceremony at the American space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

More about the news:

1. The SUV-size satellite will be shipped to India in a special cargo container flight for a possible launch in 2024 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh.
2. It is one step closer to fulfilling the immense scientific potentialNASA and ISRO envisioned for NISAR when both joined forces more than eight years ago.
3. This mission will be a powerful demonstration of the capability of radar as a science tool and help us study Earth’s dynamic land and ice surfaces in greater detail than ever before.

What is NISAR?

1. It has been built by space agencies of the US and India under a partnership agreement signed in 2014.
2. The 2,800 kilograms satellite consists of both L-band and S-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instruments, which makes it a dual-frequency imaging radar satellite.
3. NASA has provided the L-band radar, GPS, a high-capacity solid-state recorder to store data, and a payload data subsystem, ISRO has provided the S-band radar, the GSLV launch system and spacecraft.
4. According to NASA, an important component of the satellite is its large 39-foot stationary antenna reflector, made of a gold-plated wire mesh, the reflector will be used to focus the radar signals emitted and received by the upward-facing feed on the instrument structure.

About the mission:

1.    It is expected to be launched in January 2024 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre into a near-polar orbit. The satellite will operate for a minimum of three years.

2. NISAR will observe subtle changes in Earth’s surfaces, helping researchers better understand the causes and consequences of such phenomena.
3. It will spot warning signs of natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides.
4. The satellite will also measure groundwater levels, track flow rates of glaciers and ice sheets, and monitor the planet’s forest and agricultural regions, which can improve our understanding of carbon exchange.
5. NISAR with the help of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) will produce high-resolution images. SAR is capable of penetrating clouds and can collect data day and night regardless of the weather conditions.
6. According to NASA, “the instrument’s imaging swath, the width of the strip of data collected along the length of the orbit track, is greater than 150 miles (240 kilometres), which allows it to image the entire Earth in 12 days.

7.    NASA requires the L-band radar for its global science operations for at least three years. Meanwhile, ISRO will utilise the S-band radar for a minimum of five years.

India, Canada Discuss Indo-Pacific Strategy

Indo-Pacific cooperation and trade were at the top of the agenda as for the India-Canada Strategic Dialogue in Delhi. The visit is seen as an attempt by both sides to put bilateral ties back on track, after several turbulent years, and focused primarily on Canada’s newly released Indo-Pacific strategy that calls India an important partner.

What

1. The MEA press release made no mention of recent tensions over vandalism by suspected pro-Khalistani groups in Canada.
2. The Canadian strategy document released contains sharp words on China’s “coercive” challenge to the international rules-based order and on human rights, and in contrast says India and Canada have a “shared tradition of democracy and pluralism, a common commitment to a rules-based international system and multilateralism, mutual interest in expanding our commercial relationship and extensive and growing people-to-people connections“.

India Response

1. “India welcomed the announcement of Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, given the shared vision of a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific.”
2. Both discussed developments in India’s neighborhood, Ukraine and cooperation in the United Nations.

Issues between India and Canada

1. India-Canada ties after a freeze between 2020-2022 over a number of issues including attacks on Indian-origin people and establishments by Khalistani groups in Canada, Canadian comments over India’s farmer protests and India’s cancellation of diplomatic talks in response.
2. The incident of vandalism against a temple, this time the Gauri Shankar Temple in Brampton, which was defaced with anti-India slogans, which the Indian Mission in Toronto raised strongly with Canadian authorities.

Trade Agreement

1. The “2023 could become the year of India-Canada reset, given the Indo-Pacific strategy convergence, trade talks which could culminate in an Early Progress Trade Agreement [EPTA].
2. Apart from encouraging investment from Canadian funds, India is also negotiating the EPTA, ahead of a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA).
3. There is two-way Foreign Direct Investment between Canada and India is about $4.6 billion, with Canadian direct investment in India at $2.9 billion and market and institutional investment into India about $70 billion.
4. “From Cleantech to critical minerals and education programs, there is a demand in India for what Canadians make, grow, and the services we provide.