Two earthquakes in Aegean Sea jolt Turkey’s west

ISTANBUL

The Aegean Sea was rocked with a string of earthquakes early on Aug. 1.

The first one was a magnitude 5.5 earthquake that occurred in the Aegean Sea, near the small Greek island of Nisyros, west of Rhodes.

The quake’s epicenter was 41 kilometers southwest of Muğla’s Datça, an isolated resort town located on Turkey’s Aegean coasts.

The Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) said the quake jolted the district at 7:31 a.m. local time.

It occurred at a depth of 14.85 kilometers below the surface, it added.

There have been no reports of damage or casualties so far, Turkish Deputy Interior Minister İsmail Çataklı tweeted.

At 11:37 a.m. local time, another earthquake with a magnitudes 4.3 was reported near the same spot, this time at a depth of 4.8 kilometers.

The second earthquake was followed by two aftershocks with magnitudes 4.2 and 3.7.

Since then, several aftershocks have occurred.

“In the last 12 hours, 131 earthquakes, with the largest 5.5-magnitude and the smallest 0.8-magnitude, occurred off the coast of Datça,” AFAD said, adding that the earthquake activities in the country and its immediate surroundings are monitored 24/7 by the agency.

The country is among the world’s most seismically active zones as it lies on several active fault lines, with the most potentially devastating being the Northern Anatolia Fault (NAF), the meeting point of the Anatolian and Eurasian tectonic plates.