Three University of Washington experts have provided the following quotes in response to the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday morning.

Harold Tobin is director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. Tobin studies tectonic plate boundaries with a focus on how faults work and the conditions inside them that lead to earthquakes. He also serves as Washington state’s seismologist.

“This region along the East Anatolian Fault has a well-known history of seismic activity, and it had been identified by Turkish emergency management as a place of high seismic hazard,” Tobin said. “However, its known history does not include earthquakes of magnitude 7 or above since seismometers existed to measure them, though historic records indicate earthquakes of up to magnitude 7.4 have occurred. The scale and size of this magnitude 7.8 quake and the one that followed are both larger than what was most likely anticipated. The fact that there was a second large and damaging quake, the magnitude 7.5 that occurred about nine hours later, is not unprecedented globally, but is very uncommon, especially at this size.