Earthquakes in Turkmenistan and Northern Iran

Not many studies have been published on the seismicity of Turkmenistan and Northeastern Iran to date. At the same time, some areas of Turkmenistan are characterized by high seismicity along with the most seismically active zones of the former USSR. It is enough to mention the well-known destructive Ashgabat earthquake, which occurred on October 5, 1948. The article compares the distributions of hypocenters of earthquakes in Turkmenistan obtained from the ISC catalog for the period from 1964 to 2021 and results of recalculating hypocenters from the ISC bulletin for the same period. In total, the ISC catalog for the specified period contains about 4800 events with a magnitude greater than 2.5. The authors recalculated hypocenters of about 3700 earthquakes. It is shown that the depths of earthquake sources in the areas under consideration can be located at depths of up to 600 km, while according to the ISC catalog, the maximum focal depths do not exceed 100 km.