Turkey hit by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in the middle of the night

Steph Deschamps / November 23, 2022

A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck northwestern Turkey at dawn Wednesday, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said, injuring 22 people according to Turkish authorities.

The tremor, located at a depth of about ten kilometers, occurred at 04:08 about 170 km east of Istanbul, the country's largest city, said the USGS. Turkish authorities announced the earthquake's magnitude as 5.9, with the epicenter located in Gölyaka, in the northwestern province of Düzce. "We have 22 injured, one of whom is in critical condition," Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced. The USGS uses a "fixed depth" of 10 km when the initial data of the earthquake is "too weak to be calculated", says the USGS on its website.

Turkey is located in one of the most active seismic zones in the world. In January 2000, an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 struck Elazig (east), killing more than 40 people. In November of the same year, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in the Aegean Sea killed 114 people and injured over 1,000 in Turkey.