I am allright, thank you all. My house is on the 4th floor, not so high but where I live is closer to the earthquake zone. And I have earthquake phobia ever since the 1999 earthquake. I first felt dizzy and I thought something was wrong with me because yesterday I had felt dizzy also. Then this feeling of nausea. But later on my windchime (which I use for a primitive earthquake alarm) started chiming. I got up, put on my boots, took my overcoat and went downstairs. I did not use the elevator. I was afraid, really afraid but I can't help it. And it was cold outside. I smoked 2 cigarettes calmed down a bit, talked with my sons, they told me to get back in the house and not stay out in the cold. After I got back in I did not take my boots and coat out for some time. Then I drank some wine.
Then I turned on the TV to hear what our experts were saying. One of them said 2013 will be the year of disasters the world over, not very encouraging. The others tried to calm down people, saying this is not a precursor to another big quake and that it would let out some stress from the north anatolian fault. But while it lets some stress off it also helps to build stress on the uncracked parts which are in the Marmara sea and closer to Istanbul. Also in the morning there were two other earthquakes in Adıyaman, a 4.7 and a 4.4 (southeastern Turkey). Well, Turkey is being pushed northwards by the arabian peninsula and westwards by Asia. So it is bound to crack and it does. Also the Aegean Sea is full of surprises, the other day I read about the volcano 200 km. off the coast of Milas (soutwestern Turkey). There is also another volcano is western Turkey.
Sorry if I sound too pessimistic but these are facts.
Stress triggering has been invoked to explain the 60-year sequence of earthquakes rupturing toward Istanbul [Toksoz et al ref](1-3), in which all but one event promoted the next (4). Although an earthquake drops the average stress on the fault that slipped, it also changes the stress elsewhere. The seismicity rate has been observed to rise in regions of stress increase and fall where the off-fault stress decreases (5,6). The M=7.4 Izmit earthquake, as well as most background seismicity (7), occurred where the failure stress is calculated to have increased 1-2 bars (0.1-0.2 MPa) by M³6.5 earthquakes since 1939 (Fig. 1A) (8). The Izmit event, in turn, increased the stress beyond the east end of the rupture by 1-2 bars, where the M=7.2 Düzce earthquake struck, and by 0.5-5.0 bars beyond the west end of the 17 August rupture, where a cluster of aftershocks occurred (Fig 1B). The correspondence seen here between calculated stress changes and the occurrence of large and small earthquakes, also reported in (9), strengthens the rationale for incorporating stress transfer into a seismic hazard assessment.
The last paragraph is taken from a paper titled "Heightened odds of large earthquakes near Istanbul: An interaction-based probability calculation
by Tom Parsons, Shinji Toda, Ross S. Stein, Aykut Barka, James H. Dieterich http://web.itu.edu.tr/~barka/pubs/ist_haz/istanbul.html