Natural Disasters in Turkey

Final Hazards Report - Turkey After a semester of research on the hazards of Turkey, the two main hazards I will be discussing in this final blog is mass wasting and earthquakes.  Scientists have found nearly 45 active slides alone on Mount Akdag, along the Western Taurus range in Turkey. Mass wasting, or landslides, is the movement of earth materials downslope and, although perhaps not as dramatic as an earthquake or a volcano, the results, nevertheless, can be as devastating. Karst, glacial, tectonic and gravitational processes which contribute to mass wasting exist more than a mile high on Mount Akdag.  The southern slope is the most active, with a slide covering more than three miles, and with a total spread of just over six miles. However, this mountain has a preponderance of landslides which have occurred all around it. High debris which flows down into the river system at the base of the mountain contributes to frequent torrents and flooding and presents

Turkey's coastal provinces make up roughly 30% of the country's entire land.  And, about 30 million residents, out of a total population of 75.6 million, live along the coast.  More people than ever are moving to the world's coasts, increasing the pressure to relax development standards created for safety, such as building too close to the shore.   Turkey’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (May 2018) estimates that the global sea level will rise an estimated 7 to 23 inches in the next century due to global climate change, global warming and melting of ice sheets. Rising sea levels will result, inundating wetlands and other low-lying lands, eroding beaches, intensify flooding, and increasing salinity of rivers and groundwater tables.  With so much of the country at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels,Turkey is on it!  Sea level observation stations (tide gauges) in Turkey are deployed and operated for mapping act

Like much of the rest of the world subjected to a changing environment and rapid urbanization, wildfires have been steadily increasing.   For example, m ore than 620,000 acres of forest land burned in 1,132 fires during 2017 alone when forest lands were turned into ashes because of different fires which occurred in the western province of İzmir. Both human and wildlife lives were lost and local forestry ministers estimate it will take 10 years or more for a new ecosystem and forest to form. Fires also burned in Turkey in the Mediterranean and Aegean provinces of Muğla, Antalya and Denizli in 2017, as well as the eastern province of Erzurum and the capital of Ankara.   This satellite image was collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the NASA Aqua satellite on July 3, 2017.   Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS’s thermal bands appear in red. According to the 2016 statistics, only 10 percent of the forest land fires were caused by