North Anatolian Fault

The North Anatolian Fault is an active right-lateral strike-slip fault running roughly 1,200 to 1,500 kilometers westward across northern Turkey, from the Karliova triple junction, where it meets the East Anatolian Fault, to the Aegean Sea, passing about 20 kilometers south of Istanbul. It marks the transform boundary along which the Anatolian sub-plate slides west relative to the Eurasian plate, and geologists have compared its length and slip rate to California's San Andreas Fault. Near Istanbul a releasing bend in the fault has pulled open the extensional basin now filled by the Sea of Marmara. Since the catastrophic 1939 Erzincan earthquake, a sequence of seven earthquakes above magnitude 7.0 has swept progressively westward along the fault, a pattern that let seismologists anticipate the devastating 1999 Izmit earthquake and that leaves experts watching for a further rupture nearer heavily populated Istanbul. This entity documents the North Anatolian Fault specifically as a geological formation, the fault system itself.