An earthquake lasted 50 days, but no one felt it. Here's why.

“You could call them phantom quakes,” one geologist says of the tectonic phenomena known as slow slip events.

Back in the summer of 2016, a big earthquake struck northwestern Turkey. That’s not so unusual, considering that the region sits atop a highly active branching fault network that has a history of producing some seriously powerful tremblors.

The strange thing about this particular quake is that it lasted for 50 days, and not a single soul felt it.

According to a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the temblor was a very peculiar type of earthquake known as a slow slip event. Unlike “typical” earthquakes, which crack the crust with a sudden jolt, slow slips involve very gradual movement along a fault. They release none of the damaging seismic waves you might normally expect, which means

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