ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) has refuted the “misinformation” created through social media pertaining to the occurrence of a major earthquake in Pakistan in the coming days, saying there was no relation between Turkish earthquake and Pakistan scientifically.

“There is no direct fault link between Turkey and Pakistan that could trigger faults in Pakistan/Iran or Afghanistan,” it said in a statement.

The devastating earthquake with magnitude 7.8 which occurred in southern Turkey created panic in Pakistan by some social media alleging that the quake with the same magnitude might occur in Pakistan in a few days.

The PMD was running its seismic monitoring network comprising thirty remote monitoring stations and it was recording earthquakes occurring within and surrounding areas every day which are of small to medium range magnitudes.

Seismic hazard assessment is an effort by earth scientists to quantify seismic hazard and its associated uncertainty in time and space and to provide seismic hazard estimates for seismic risk assessment and other applications but nothing concerned with the prediction of earthquakes.

“It is worth mentioning that earthquake is purely a natural phenomenon. Pakistan and neighbouring countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan have experienced many major damaging earthquakes in past. These countries are earthquake-prone countries and PMD seismic monitoring network is recording more than 100 quakes every day,” it said.

The possibility of occurrence of major earthquakes in Pakistan and surrounding countries was “always there”, it said, however, when and where or the timeline of happening was beyond the reach of existing technology.

“The prevailing method is to find the seismic hazard of the areas by using previous seismic data which explores the potential of earthquake fault,” the PMD said.