Statistical behaviours of earthquake occurrences in the Central Anatolian Region of Turkey: region-time-magnitude analyses

The main objective of this work is to make detailed region-time-magnitude analyses by describing the statistical behaviours of earthquakes in the Central Anatolian Region of Turkey. In this scope, several seismic and tectonic parameters such as Mcomp, b-value, Dc-value, Z-value, recurrence times and annual probabilities were evaluated. For the analyses, a homogeneous catalogue including 10,146 earthquakes with 1.0 ≤ Md ≤ 5.7 between 30 July 1975 and 29 December 2018 was used and spatio-temporal changes of earthquake behaviours were mapped for the beginning of 2019. Earthquake magnitudes varied from 1.9 to 3.0 on average, and hence Mcomp was considered to be 2.6. The b-value was calculated as 1.26 ± 0.07, and this relatively large value indicates that small-magnitude events are dominant. The Dc-value was computed as 1.31 ± 0.03. This small value means that distances between epicentres approach the diameter of the cluster, and seismic activity is more clustered at smaller scales or in larger regions. The spatio-temporal analyses of recurrence times suggest that the Central Anatolian Region has an intermediate/long-term earthquake hazard in comparison to occurrences of strong earthquakes in the short term. Several anomaly regions of a small b-value and a large Z-value were found in and around the Tuzgölü Fault Zone, Central Anatolian Fault Zone, Salanda fault and Niğde fault at the beginning of 2019. Thus, a combination of the regions with a lower b-value, a higher Z-value and also moderate recurrence times may give significant clues for the future possible earthquakes, and detected regions may be thought to be the most likely areas for strong/large events in the Central Anatolian Region.