Turkey Is Splitting Apart And It's Visible From Space

Bright Side

Let’s tell a story about a recent geological discovery that changes what scientists thought they knew about Turkey’s crust. Researchers from Curtin University in Australia found that a massive fault beneath central Turkey - the Tuz Gölü Fault Zone - isn’t just sliding sideways like most faults in the region. Instead, it’s slowly pulling apart, stretching the land by about one millimeter per year. This discovery came from studying ancient lava flows from the Hasandağ volcano, which once cooled across the fault and later cracked during earthquakes. By dating zircon crystals inside the lava and measuring their displacement, scientists were able to reconstruct the fault’s motion over thousands of years. The results overturn long-held assumptions: the Tuz Gölü Fault is an extensional fault, meaning Turkey’s crust is literally tearing open.   Animation is created by Bright Side.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV  Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Our Social Media:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightplanet/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en   Stock materials (photos, footages and other):  https://www.depositphotos.com  https://www.shutterstock.com  https://www.eastnews.ru  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.

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00:00Turkey is quietly tearing itself open, and no one noticed for decades.

00:06Scientists didn't just get a detail wrong,

00:08they misunderstood the entire motion of a massive chunk of Earth's crust.

00:13What they thought was sliding sideways is actually stretching apart,

00:17inch by inch, like the planet is slowly pulled in two.

00:22And once you see that rupture, you start noticing them everywhere.

00:25To understand why this shocked geologists so badly,

00:30picture Earth's crust like a cracked shell floating on something hot and squishy underneath.

00:35Those cracked pieces are tectonic plates.

00:38They move a few inches per year, which sounds tiny,

00:41but over millions of years, it reshapes continents.

00:45Turkey sits in one of the most uncomfortable places on Earth,

00:48squeezed between three huge plates,

00:50Eurasia to the north, Africa to the south,

00:53and Arabia pushing in from the southeast like an elbow in a crowded bus.

00:59For decades, scientists believe Turkey survived this squeeze by sliding sideways.

01:04This type of movement is called a strike-slip fault,

01:07which basically means two chunks of land grind past each other like hands rubbing together.

01:13Turkey has famous ones, like the North Anatolian Fault, which produces horrible earthquakes.

01:18That model felt neat and logical.

01:22Pressure comes in, land escapes sideways.

01:25Problem solved.

01:27Or so everyone thought.

01:29But geology doesn't always follow neat models made up by humans.

01:33There is a long fracture running beneath salt flats and farmland under central Turkey.

01:39It never behaved like the dangerous sideways faults, so it got less attention.

01:43Then researchers from Curtin University decided to look closer.

01:47And instead of watching earthquakes, they watched lava.

01:51Ancient lava.

01:52Lava that flowed across the fault thousands of years ago,

01:56cooled into solid rock, and later ruptured apart.

02:00There are tiny crystals called zircons inside that lava.

02:03They're basically nature's stopwatches.

02:05Zircons trap radioactive elements that decay in a predictable rate,

02:10so scientists can tell exactly when the lava cooled.

02:13When they matched lava chunks on opposite sides of the fault and measured how far they drifted apart,

02:19the team managed to reconstruct how the fault was moving over thousands of years.

02:24It turned out that the fault wasn't sliding sideways at all.

02:28It was slowly and steadily pulling apart, just a fraction of an inch per year.

02:32That's thinner than a grain of rice, but over geological time, it's massive.

02:38This type of fault is called an extensional fault,

02:41which means the crust stretches until it thins and breaks.

02:45In simple terms, turkey isn't just being squeezed, it's being torn open.

02:51And as if that wasn't dramatic enough, the story gets worse.

02:55Other studies show that parts of turkey's crust aren't just stretching,

02:58they're dripping downward into the mantle.

03:00When dense chunks of crust get heavy enough,

03:04they peel off and sink like blobs of wax in a lava lamp.

03:08Scientists call it lithospheric dripping,

03:10and this process is basically Earth quietly losing pieces of itself.

03:15When that happens, the surface above weakens.

03:19The land rises, sinks, fractures, and rearranges.

03:23Earthquakes don't always need plates to slam together.

03:26Sometimes the ground fails because its support system melts away from below.

03:31That's why turkey's geology now looks less like a solid slab

03:34and more like stretched taffy over a fire.

03:38Turkey isn't alone with the tectonic drama.

03:41Africa is unzipping itself so slowly that no human will ever wake up

03:46to a brand new ocean outside their window,

03:48yet fast enough that scientists can measure it happening right now.

03:52Deep beneath East Africa, the ground stretches and thins.

03:57Over millions of years, that constant stretch doesn't just rupture rocks,

04:01it rewrites geography,

04:02and it can literally create an ocean where solid land once stood.

04:06All of this focuses on something called the East African Rift System.

04:12This rift runs thousands of miles across places like Ethiopia,

04:16Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique,

04:19and it ranks among the largest rift zones on Earth.

04:23A rift zone is where the planet's crust is being pulled apart

04:26instead of being squished together.

04:28Africa doesn't just have a rift zone,

04:30but one of the most extreme versions anywhere,

04:33and it's been stretching for tens of millions of years

04:36like a slow-motion disaster movie.

04:39And the continent isn't one solid piece anymore.

04:43It's splitting into two massive tectonic plates.

04:47The Nubian plate sits to the West,

04:49the Somalian plate to the East,

04:51and they're drifting apart at less than an inch per year,

04:54which sounds like a joke

04:55until you realize your fingernails grow at about the same speed.

04:59But just like in Turkey,

05:01this tiny movement adds up over millions of years.

05:05Back in 2018,

05:06photos of a massive rupture in Kenya caused chaos over the Internet,

05:11and headlines panicked everyone with the news

05:13that Africa was splitting in half.

05:16The image looked intense,

05:17but it didn't mean the continent snapped overnight like a broken cookie.

05:21A much deeper process has been going on

05:23for about 25 million years already,

05:26and if we could jump another 5 or 10 million years into the future,

05:30we'd probably watch the crust stretch so thin

05:33that seawater finally rushes in and fills the gap.

05:37While Africa is tearing apart vertically like a slow zipper,

05:41India could be splitting in a totally different way,

05:44horizontally into two giant layers,

05:47each about 60 miles thick,

05:50right as it crashes into Eurasia.

05:52And this collision is what gave us the Himalayas

05:56and the massive Tibetan plateau sitting behind them

05:59like a high-altitude backstage area.

06:02Everyone agrees on the basics.

06:04India has been creeping north for over 60 million years

06:07at about the speed your hair grows,

06:10slamming into Eurasia and forcing rock upward

06:13until it turned into the tallest mountains on Earth.

06:16What no one fully agreed on was how Tibet got so insanely high.

06:22Some scientists thought India was too buoyant to sink

06:25and just slid underneath Eurasia.

06:27Others imagined the plate buckling like a sheet of paper pushed into a wall.

06:32Then a third idea showed up and changed the vibe completely.

06:36This new theory says the Indian plate is delaminating,

06:41which means its top layer peels away and props up Tibet.

06:44At the same time, the heavier bottom layer sinks into the mantle,

06:48the hot semi-molten layer beneath Earth's crust.

06:51Scientists can't drill that deep to check,

06:53so they followed a clue instead.

06:56Helium leaking from Tibetan hot springs.

06:59Helium-3 is incredibly rare and mostly comes from deep inside Earth,

07:04and helium-4 forms closer to the surface.

07:07When researchers measured gases from hundreds of springs,

07:10they found helium-3 leaking out in northern Tibet.

07:14It means that the mantle sits dangerously close to the surface there.

07:18Farther south, that signal disappears.

07:21So it most definitely means that the plate hasn't fully split yet.

07:25But we have earthquake patterns that line up with the same story,

07:29so it looks like India isn't just pushing mountains up.

07:32It's peeling itself apart from the inside while doing it.

07:37All these tectonic processes fit in well with the new massive global stress map.

07:43It shows where the planet is holding it together and where it's dangerously close to rupturing.

07:49Scientists built it from over 100,000 real stress measurements taken from boreholes,

07:54earthquakes, and field tests,

07:57which is more than double what we had less than a decade ago.

08:00Stress here means the invisible push-and-pull forces inside Earth's crust,

08:05the same forces that quietly load faults for years before one bad day turns into an earthquake.

08:10This map doesn't just help explain earthquakes,

08:14but also not to mess things up ourselves.

08:18If you drill a tunnel, inject carbon underground,

08:21or build a geothermal plant without knowing which way the rocks want to snap,

08:25you're basically poking a sleeping dragon.

08:29Engineers use this stress data to decide how to angle wells and tunnels

08:33so they don't accidentally cause failures.

08:36Basically, we're finally getting a live dashboard for Earth's breaking points,

08:41and that's a big deal when you live on the surface of a restless planet.

08:46For a long time, we treated continents like rigid boards floating on soup.

08:51Now they look more like stressed muscles,

08:53flexing, tearing, healing, and tearing again.

08:57It shows that the planet under your feet isn't finished.

09:01It's still under construction.

09:04That's it for today.

09:05So hey, if you pacified your curiosity,

09:07then give the video a like and share it with your friends.

09:10Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.

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