A study published in the journal of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences by researchers from Italy, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, presents a new catalogue of earthquakes in Central Asia. The catalogue brings together data from several existing databases that used different ways of reporting earthquake size. It standardizes this information using “moment magnitude”, which is a modern scientific scale to measure the size and energy of an earthquake.
The catalogue was created with the support of experts from local scientific communities across Central Asia. It was developed as part of the “Strengthening Financial Resilience and Accelerating Risk Reduction in Central Asia (SFRARR)” regional program funded by the European Union, the World Bank, and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. The goal of the program is to improve financial resilience and promote investment in disaster and climate resilience in Central Asia. The catalogue is intended to help local stakeholders and governments develop better risk management strategies.
Central Asia is known to be a highly earthquake-prone region. Many significant earthquakes have occurred in the region, including in Turkmenistan, which has four active seismic regions: Turkmen-Khorasan, Balkan-Caspian, Elbursky, and Garuda-Kugitang. Some of the strongest earthquakes in these areas include events in Krasnovodsk in 1895, German in 1929, Kazanjik in 1946, Ashgabat in 1948, and Balkan in 2000, with magnitudes ranging from 7.0 to 8.2.
In their article, the authors describe the steps they took to develop the new catalogue. They collected and combined global and regional earthquake data from publicly available sources, and combined it with information from local authorities in the participating countries. One of the major challenges was that different sources reported earthquake sizes using different units, and some events were duplicated across databases. The researchers carefully collected, merged, cleaned, and converted data into a single consistent format. They focused especially on improving the data from 1900 onward, while keeping the earlier records unchanged.
The final catalogue contains more than 77 thousand earthquake events across Central Asia up to year 2020, with a moment magnitude ranging from 3.0 to 8.5. The resulting dataset is shown in Figure 1. The dataset is publicly available and offers a valuable tool for understanding the seismic activity in the region. The use of standardised magnitude scale also makes it easier to update and expand the dataset in the future. Local scientific communities in Central Asia can now use this improved database for further analysis and discussions.
Image: Data on seismic events in Central Asia based on a new catalogue.
Source: Poggi et al. (2024)
