The North Anatolian Fault tore straight through an industrial belt in the pre-dawn dark — a textbook 'unzipping' toward a city, the kind Istanbul still waits on.
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DownloadThe 1999 Izmit earthquake struck on August 17, 1999, registering magnitude 7.6 (estimated magnitude). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 251× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 40.75°N, 29.86°E, at a depth of about 17 km — a shallow crustal earthquake. Shallow earthquakes like this release their energy close to the surface, which is why the shaking near the epicenter was so violent.
An estimated 17,118 people were killed.