Active Faulting in Northern Turkey

The North Anatolian fault zone of Turkey has become widely publicized in recent years because of the remarkable series of earthquakes that began along it in 1939 -- most of which have been associated with dextral surface displacements that have successively delineated the fault trace from east to west (Ketin and Roesli, 1953; Ambraseys and Zátopek, 1968). It is not so generally recognized that even prior to 1939 the fault zone could easily have been recognized on the basis of abundant and through-going features of Quaternary displacements, and that the North Anatolian fault is almost completely analogous to the better-known active transcurrent faults of the circum-Pacific region, such as the San Andreas fault of California and the Alpine fault of New Zealand.