Another "killer" quake has struck — this time in Turkey.
Thousands are dead — more thousands injured — multiple thousands homeless.
Shaken into abject terror, the populace of a four-province area faces the grim harbingers of famine, cholera and death.
Is this disaster only an isolated incident or is there a terrible pattern unfolding?
The staggering truth in this article reveals WHY killer quakes are stalking the earth and what the FUTURE holds.
HOW LONG is five minutes?
Watching your favorite television show, playing a scintillating game of bridge or laughing and talking with old friends — five minutes slip away almost unnoticed.
BUT, when the earth suddenly convulses beneath you in savage violence and your familiar world begins to dissolve in crashing chaos — five minutes can be an eternity.
For the one million inhabitants of 150 remote village sin and around Erzurum Province in eastern Turkey, the five-minute time period in which their "world" collapsed in grinding, rumbling horror will forever stand out as a seemingly unending period of terror.
The majestic mountain peaks framing the broad, fertile plain, which is Erzurum Province, caught the mid-afternoon sun that day. The villagers worked peacefully in their fields as they have for centuries. The grey, volcanic stone buildings clustered in little village groups made quaint patterns in the patchwork of grey and green.
That Fateful Moment
This peaceful, pastoral world came to an end at 3:26 p.m. on Friday, August 19, 1966. The rolling shock wave of a giant "killer" earthquake — striking in sudden fury — engulfed a four-province area. For five long, "eternal" minutes, shock wave after shock wave convulsed the valleys and made twisted rubble piles of the once patternful villages. Thousands of homes built of wood frame and adobe-type mud plaster dissolved in an instant.
Whole mountainsides collapsed with the jarring power of the quake sending rolling waves of earth and debris like a tidal wave to engulf homes and villages. Cracks and crevasses opened and closed like many huge mouths roaring the anger of a tortured earth.
Thousands died!
Whole families were wiped out. Children, mothers, fathers were buried — some never to be seen again. Children, now without mother and father, sobbed uncomforted, unheeded into the chill, black night of terror ahead. Frantic parents searched hopelessly in the twisted rubble of homes and buildings for children who moments before waved a cheerful hello across the meadow.
The grim statistics may never be completely known — 150 villages in 4 provinces were demolished. At least 2500 are dead — perhaps many more. Other thousands are injured. The economy and structure of the area will be affected for years to come.
Yet the earthquake alone may not take as many lives as the macabre aftermath of starvation, polluted water, cholera, dysentery, and typhoid.
This is the story of a "killer quake." This is a story that has been written many times before and will be written many times again. But underlying this story is a terrible pattern and a far more profound and terrifying story that you need to know and realize — because it affects your life, your future. Don't think it can't happen where you live — earthquakes can strike anywhere on earth!
The Historic Record
For centuries earthquakes have occurred, bringing sudden death and terror. In the centuries that man has recorded these quakes a definite pattern has developed. The majority of earthquakes occur in a giant belt which encompasses the western one third of the continents of North and South America, swings westerly across the Aleutian Islands, then proceeds southerly in a two-thousand-mile corridor down the eastern coast of Asia down through Indonesia, swinging out into the Pacific Ocean east of Australia, taking in New Zealand before disappearing into the vast Pacific regions of the Antarctic. This belt appears again, rising up out of the North Atlantic Ocean to proceed in a thousand-mile wide swath through the Mediterranean coastlands of Spain, Southern Europe, North Africa, Italy, Greece and Turkey, joining the east Asian belt through Iran, Pakistan and India. Another tributary of this zone turns south near Egypt and runs the length of the eastern one third of the continent of Africa. (Study the accompanying map)
Certainly vivid in most of our memories are the recent "killers" which struck Yellowstone, Wyoming, U.S.A. in 1959, Chile in South America in 1960 and Anchorage, Alaska in 1964. Other "killers" of recent years were the San Francisco quake of 1906 and the Los Angeles-Long Beach quake of 1933.
Countless other major earthquakes, too numerous to mention, have occurred in this earthquake belt through the centuries and in recent years.
Even greater earthquakes than these listed have occurred in remote, unpopulated areas of the earth and under the sea. These huge "killers" have gone unpublicized because no major loss of life has been recorded.
What Recent Investigations Have Disclosed
Although scientists and seismologists have known that earthquakes were more likely to occur in these areas, the awesome correlation of these areas into associated earthquake fault systems is a fact only recently discovered.
The International Geophysical Year of 1957 — a year devoted to intensive and far-reaching studies of the earth's crust and the vast ocean beds — revealed hitherto unknown facts about the earth's earthquake systems. The facts gathered from this 1957 study are still being studied and analyzed.
The most significant findings of this survey disclosed that the known earthquake faults or cracks in the earth were not isolated cracks or faults, but a vast interrelated system of faults which is WORLDWIDE in scope. The San Andreas Fault line in California, which for years was thought to be a single great fracture in the earth's surface, is now known to extend indefinitely in both directions beneath the surface of the sea.
The Pioneer, a vessel of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, doing research in the North Pacific in 1963, discovered a gigantic sea-bottom crack and fracture zone. One newly discovered crack begins about 700 miles southwest of Kodiak Island in the Aleutians and appears to run for eight hundred miles toward the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. In this same zone running approximately between the Hawaiian Islands and the West Coast of the U.S.A. are several giant cracks or faults running for approximately four thousand miles. According to the Science News of May 1966, these newly discovered earthquake faults or cracks are not just the separation of a few feet in the earth's crust, the usual picture of an earthquake, but are nearly TWO HUNDRED MILES WIDE.
One of the outstanding earth fault discoveries made during the 1957 Geophysical Year was the discovery of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a fantastic rift beginning in Antarctica at the southern polar region, tracing its way through the South Atlantic and the North Atlantic to the north polar region, where it joins another system which extends down through the Pacific Ocean, making a gargantuan crack — AROUND THE WORLD.
Seismologists and earthquake researchers have had to revise their concepts of earthquake potential in light of the recent discoveries. No longer can a single earthquake be considered as an isolated incident, but, rather a symptom in a complex interrelated system of earthquake faults which is worldwide in scope!
But more breathtaking than this is the sobering realization that seismic forces of such cataclysmic proportion exist within the earth that earthquakes of WORLDWIDE scope are now a reality.
What the Future Holds
All about us in this earth is mute testimony. We see great mountains with twisted, uplifted strata. We can visit giant valleys and chasms which have been created by super upheavals of the earth. In many places on the surface of the earth can be viewed the very fault lines themselves with the tortured rock and distorted strata. One such area I have visited many times. It is here in California, not over 50 miles from Pasadena, in the Coastal Range Mountains near Gorman, California. Here the San Gabriel fault, a tributary of the great San Andreas Fault line — often called the "Mother of Earthquakes" — is exposed plainly to view.
I have never seen such a dramatic display of wildly distorted strata anywhere. As many times as I have gone through this area I am still spellbound by the fantastic potential of earthquake force shown so graphically there. I have often thought what a mighty city like our neighboring metropolis of Los Angeles would look like should such displacement occur beneath the city. No building could withstand it.
This testimony, written in the strata of the earth, with the facts recently analyzed and put together, brings us to one inexorable question: when will global quakes strike?
You need to know the answer. It is revealed in your Bible.
The Truth Revealed
Whether the world acknowledges it or not, there is an Almighty, Omnipotent God who has set down rules and regulations of life. If mankind were to follow those laws they would lead to peace, happiness, good health and prosperity.
Almighty God wants mankind to OBEY those laws so He can give them the peace, joy and happiness they so sorely need. Yet, man has rejected those laws and turned to his own set of standards and origins. This disobedience — as prophesied by God — has brought misery, war, starvation, hatred, crime, sexual degeneration, disease and unhappiness.
No thinking man can deny this world is on the brink of self-destruction. Even our world leaders admit there is no workable solution to our present calamities. Many top world advisers can foresee nothing but nuclear holocaust, worldwide famine, worldwide plague and pestilence.
Man, left to his own determination, will certainly end up exactly that way. But God has other plans!
God is going to see to it that mankind achieves happiness and a peaceful, wonderful, bountiful world TOMORROW. That wonderful world tomorrow is the GOOD NEWS that Jesus Christ came to announce to this world nearly 2000 years ago. It is the same good news announced by His true servants on earth today. It is the good news you read in the pages of The PLAIN TRUTH magazine and hear on The WORLD TOMORROW program on the radio.