Qualla: The 2019 East Azerbaijan Earthquake

The 2019 East Azerbaijan Earthquake: Introduction

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. At 3:17 in the morning, when most of northwestern Iran was asleep, the ground beneath East Azerbaijan Province lurched. The magnitude 5.9 earthquake on November 8, 2019, lasted only seconds, but it struck at a shallow depth of just 20 kilometers -- close enough to the surface to turn those seconds into catastrophe. Thirty villages were completely destroyed. Five people died. Hundreds more were injured, some by falling debris, others in the panicked stampede that followed. Two people would die later from carbon monoxide poisoning, killed not by the quake itself but by the fires it ignited when gas pipelines ruptured in the dark.

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

The 2019 East Azerbaijan Earthquake: Where Continents Collide

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. The geology beneath this region reads like a slow-motion crash report. The Arabian Plate pushes northward into the Eurasian Plate at roughly 20 millimeters per year, and that collision deforms an area of approximately three million square kilometers of continental crust -- one of...

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

The 2019 East Azerbaijan Earthquake: Before Dawn in Miyaneh

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Six cities and 145 villages, home to a combined population of 121,307 people, felt the earthquake's effects. The towns of Miyaneh and Sarab bore the worst. Barns collapsed and killed livestock. Landslides blocked roads. Water and sewage lines cracked. Telecommunications went dark...

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

The 2019 East Azerbaijan Earthquake: The Response

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Relief workers dispatched over 3,000 tents, 3,521 blankets, and nearly 4,600 bottles of water to the displaced. They sent 440 kitchen sets and 350 portions of bread. The numbers tell a story of a government scrambling to house and feed people whose homes had turned to rubble in s...

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

The 2019 East Azerbaijan Earthquake: A Pattern Older Than Memory

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Seven years before, in August 2012, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the same general region, killing at least 306 people and injuring over 3,200. That quake hit near the cities of Ahar and Heris, along the same active fault systems that crisscross East Azerbaijan Province. The ...

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0