That’s because there is no “localized spike” in what the map is measuring (the legend on the left as explained in the box on the right). It doesn’t show a spike in Zonguldak province (western Black Sea coast) either. There were large historical earthquakes in both regions (Kırşehir 1938, Zonguldak 1954) which the map does show.
I’m assuming that the Turkish map includes these historical quakes in its risk assessment. Whether that’s accurate or not is perhaps open to debate: seismology still gropes a bit when it comes to predictions.
Given that I have no expertise is seismology, Turkish, or Anatolian geology, I’ll shut up now. I only wished to point out that the city isn’t in the highest risk zones
So, not in the highest risk zones, but over the last approx. 2800 years, one might expect at least a few earthquakes significant enough to threaten a structure extending 60m underground.
This seems a pretty extreme example of security through obscurity. Hiding from an invader in a hole in the ground only works as long as no traitor, or someone reading a centuries-old history, spills the beans, at which point the invader only needs to fill the entrances with a few tons of rubble and leave the inhabitants to their fate. (Possibly the inhabitants were prepared to counter that by tunneling out at a different location.)
Compared to a siege of surface fortifications, it would be harder for them to batter down or climb over your walls, lob flaming or diseased things in over the walls, etc. Sure they could surround/block the entrances or tunnel in, but they could do that with any surface fortification as well. I guess the two biggest vulnerabilities would be if they plugged up all your ventilation shafts or diverted a river to flow into your entrances and flood you out. Without a river nearby, you’d just need to be able to keep one airshaft open.
An interesting educational film from the late 60s.
And Gemini was an interesting craft. It flew before Apollo but was conceived after, and in some ways was more advanced than Apollo. For example, it was designed with the input of the astronauts, and for that reason the controls and interior ended up being similar to the aircraft they were used to flying.
There was even a plan to fly the capsule in from orbit.
Gemini was intended to be a step beyond capsules like Mercury and be a bridge to the assumed inevitable future of spaceplanes. This is a future that has not yet been persued.
What looks like a really interesting documentary on the New York Public Library system has just premiered and has embarked on a limited-showing tour of the U.S. as well as three locations in Canada and also London:
In real life, Jacques Cousteau had second thoughts about the Conshelf Program, so saturation diving became pretty much the exclusive preserve of oil companies.
