A Tribute to Professor Aykut Barka
by Andew Finkel
Cornucopia 26

Professor Aykut Barka was born in Istanbul on January 7,1952. He died there on February 1, 2002, aged fifty. It took only forty-five terrible seconds to bring celebrity to the internationally respected geophysicist. In the desperate search for certainties after the lzmit quake on August 17, 1999, Barka's was the clear voice of science that ordinary people learnt to trust. He described what had happened and enumerated the dangers yet to come.

After the Izmir catastrophe, Barka would be ferried from one television station to another at the slightest tremor, reining in the tendency of the Turkish press to veer from wild sensation to empty reassurance.

Ministers and civil servants demanded his presence on committees but they did not always take his advice. He gave of himself at the expense of his own work and his family - let alone his sleep. His message of preparedness for earthquakes had been ignored for so long, and to such tragic effect, that as long as people were listening he was compelled to talk.

The North Anatolian fault system was the subject of Barka's 1981 doctoral thesis at Bristol University, where he met his wife, Sheree. He toured the region in his battered old Peugeot, learning from the villagers who remembered the great quakes between 1939 and 1944, and came to understand every kink in the earth.

After lzmit, Barka argued that a fault segment to the east was in danger of giving way. It was a stunning bit of science. Less than a month later, a second earthquake hit exactly where he had predicted. The local schoolhouse, which had only been slightly damaged in August, collapsed into rubble, but there were no casualties.

This time someone had been listening and had not allowed the building to be used.

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