Barka was born in
Fatih district of
Istanbul in 1951 and received his
PhD degree in 1981 from the
University of Bristol,
UK under the supervision of Dr. P.L. Hancock with a thesis on "
Seismotectonic Aspects of the North Anatolian Fault Zone". He worked and studied geosciences in some top rated institutions around the world, including
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris,
École Normale Supérieure Paris,
MIT's Earth Resources Laboratory,
Cambridge, MA, University of Bristol, UK and
Geological Survey of Japan. In 1997, Barka published a paper with
Ross Stein and
James H. Dieterich of
USGS, titled
"Progressive failure on the North Anatolian Fault since 1939 by earthquake stress triggering", which showed the migration of large earthquakes and, not surprisingly, positive stress accumulation in the
Marmara Region. Only two years after this paper was published, the M7.4
1999 İzmit earthquake hit the
Marmara Region, killing more than 17,000 people. Aykut Barka died on February 1, 2002, from injuries suffered in a car accident five weeks earlier. He left a wife and two young children. ==Bibliography==