Dear Earthquake Alert XXL subscribers
You were probably wondering about the alert for a M6.8 event in Turkey in the Sea of Marmara at 20:20 on February 20, sent out on February 20, 23:35. You have no doubt realised already that this message was erroneous, which was caused by a mistake in our configuration. The earthquake parameters were correctly determined after a few minutes and show this earthquake to be real but have a much much smaller magnitude of 4.0:
GEOFON Event gfz2022doxk: Turkey
Unfortunately, modifications of magnitude currently do not trigger an updated email message. We apologise for the sending of the grossly erroneous message and hope that it did not cause distress. We have now corrected this particular issue, but also take this opportunity to remind users that automatic determinations have a high degree of uncertainty and encourage users of email and forum notifications to double-check the latest earthquake parameters by clicking on the link contained in the email.
As a result if this, we will also review also our procedures for sending out forum alerts.
Your GEOFON team