Event T from Tevekkelli Trench
At the Tevekkelli Trench, excavated across the
southwestern part of the
Pazarcık segment of the East Anatolian Fault,
Yönlü and Karabacak (2023:5-6) identified
Event T as the oldest surface-rupturing earthquake
recognized in trench T1. The trench exposed a
prominent
shear zone
made of pervasively sheared
plastic clay gouge,
with
shear fabrics
and faulted blocks indicating dominant
strike-slip movement.
The authors interpret these shear fabrics as
characteristic of
coseismic movement,
suggesting that the recognized paleoearthquakes
were large surface-rupturing events.
Yönlü and Karabacak (2023:6) report that
"the oldest event in the trench was identified
as a
fault splay
that terminates below unit d" and cuts unit c. A
radiocarbon sample
from the overlying unit d yielded a
calibrated age
of 7561–7131 BCE (
2σ), while a sample from unit c,
which predates Event T, yielded a calibrated age
of 8591–7961 BCE (2σ). Event T is therefore constrained
to between 8591 and 7131 BCE (2σ).
The event occurred within a very low-sedimentation
trench sequence, where nearly 10,000 years of
deposition are represented by less than 2 m of
strata. Yönlü and Karabacak (2023:6) note that
nine
detrital charcoal
ages from Tevekkelli T1 are in stratigraphic
order, suggesting limited reworking. Event T
therefore appears to represent an Early
Holocene
surface rupture on the Tevekkelli subsection of
the Pazarcık segment, but it cannot be correlated
with any historical earthquake.
