Seismostatic expedition of the Moscow State University Mehmat to Armenia. July 1989. Participant's history | iLike

Seismostatic expedition of the Moscow State University Mehmat to Armenia. July 1989. Participant's history

Seismostatic expedition of the Moscow State University Mehmat to Armenia. Six months after the Spitak earthquake. July 1989. 

The causes of the earthquakes are still not known for sure. Seismologists have many theories about this, but the main thing for us is that earthquakes are inevitable. The line of the greatest seismological activity runs along the Alpine belt of the Earth. These are the Cordillera, the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, access to the Iberian Peninsula, then through the Alps to the Caucasus, then through the Hindu Kush to the Pamirs and Himalayas, then to Japan, the Kuriles, Kamchatka. It is these zones of our planet that are prone to the most powerful earthquakes and tsunamis.

But these developments do not appear immediately. Terrestrial rocks are quite hard and ossified. Tension accumulates in them for years. But one day, a huge crack several kilometers deep appears in the earth, and two land masses instantly shift by an average meter relative to each other. Such a crack can reach a length of several tens of kilometers. It is such a crack that causes earthquakes and tsunamis. No one knows when and where it will form next. 

In December 1988, it happened in Armenia. At that time, my colleagues and I from the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR walked several kilometers along this crack (its total length was about 30 kilometers). The earth ruptured and moved along this seam. As a result, three large Armenian cities were destroyed. One of the photos shows the only "surviving" multi-storey building in Spitak. All the others formed an accordion...</p>