ИСТИНА

The 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaras earthquake sequence resulted in widespread damage in an area of about 350,000 km and about sixty thousands of fatalities in Turkey and Syria; both earthquakes rank as the 5th-6th deadliest ones since the year 2000. Different agencies reported the extreme intensity up to XII (MMI scale) around the first major shock epicenter and in Antakya, as well the maximum peak ground acceleration (PGA) of 2.2 g recorded at Pazarcık Belediyesi Parkı and extreme magnitude determinations of the two major earthquakes (e.g. GEOSCOPE estimated MW 8.0 and 7.7 and Geological Survey of Russian Academy of Science provided M 8.0 and 7.8, respectively, with XI-XII (MMI scale) at their epicenters. After the deadly 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2011 mega-thrust off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku Wyss et al. (2012) have shown “that earthquake mitigation measures in areas where large earthquakes are possible may not be based on GSHAP maps” and urged “that the international project Global Earthquake Model (http://www.globalquakemodel.org/) is on the wrong track, if it continues to base seismic risk estimates on the standard method to assess seismic hazard”. The Kahramanmaras earthquake sequence has demonstrated that the GEM's 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years “is inadmissible for any type of responsible evaluation of seismic risk and making decisions concerning earthquake disaster prevention”: the seismic intensity differences, sampled by epicenters of the 21 deadliest quakes, are mostly positive with average and median of 2 units on MMI scale. It deserves noting that the Kahramanmaras earthquake sequence confirms the pattern-recognition determination of the strong earthquake-prone areas by Gelfand et al. (1973) and the alert for a magnitude M8.0+ in July 2021–June 2026 diagnosed in the on-going real time Global Test of M8 Algorithm carried on in real-time mode since 1992 – the epicenters of both major earthquakes fall inside (i) narrow vicinity of the “dangerous” D-intersections of morphostructural node A39 recognized in 1973 as prone to disastrous earthquakes and (ii) the two out of the only seven Circles of Investigation alerted for a magnitude 8 earthquake.