That sure was a short bit of info...

I'm glad you visited their Lab.

I attended an interesting meeting last night - Tom Rockwell of UCSD gave a presentation on the seismic gap near Istanbul on the Anatoli fault - several trenches were dug and lots of earthquakes were correlated in the trenches to 2000 years of history. Its pretty evident that we'll see a 7.5 hit Istanbul in our lifetimes.

The good news here is that the government of Turkey is busy working on reenforcement and mitigation for the expected earthquake. A lot of the damage in 1999 was due to contractors trying to make profits by taking shortcuts on the materials. Now all buildings are being checked and retro-fitted. Another interesting thing was pointed out - during the Ottoman empire they also had building codes - to take into account the earthquakes. Many 300-400 year old buildings make it through those earthquakes.

Canie