the British music industry. Political background Beginning with late 1987 the Caucasus region was experiencing a surge in political turmoil with large and near constant demonstrations being held in the capital of Yerevan beginning in February 1988. For the fifteen months prior to the earthquake and at times up to hundreds of thousands of protesters, represented by the Karabakh Committee, were demanding both democracy and the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh (administered by Soviet Azerbaijan but disputed autonomous territory with a 76% Armenian majority and a 23% Azerbaijani minority in 1989) in the mountains of the Karabakh region. The unrest and the opposition movement began in September 1988 with negotiations between the Karabakh Committee and Gorbachev taking place throughout most of 1989. The relationship between the Soviet authorities and the Armenian society took a turn for the worse in March and the developments climaxed in November when a state of emergency was declared, along with a nighttime curfew, and a mass movement of up to 50,000 Armenians fleeing ethnic violence in events such as the Sumgait Pogrom arrived from Azerbaijan. Earthquake The source of the event was a fault rupture south of the Caucasus Mountains, a mountain range that has been produced by the convergence of the Arabian and the Eurasian tectonic plates. The range is situated along an active seismic belt that stretches from the Alps in southern Europe to the Himalayas in Asia. The seismicity along this belt is marked by frequent major earthquakes from the Aegean Sea, through Turkey and Iran, and into Afghanistan. Though the recurrence of seismic events in Armenia does not reach the high frequency that is seen in other segments of this zone, rapid crustal deformation there is associated with active thrust faulting and volcanic activity. Mount Ararat, a dormant volcano, lies to the south of the quake's epicenter in Turkey. The earthquake occurred along a known thrust fault striking parallel to the Caucasus range and dipping to the north-northeast. Bruce Bolt, a seismologist and a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, walked the length of the fault scarp in 1992 and found that the vertical displacement measured along most of the length with the southwest end reaching . During the earthquake, the northeast-facing side of the Spitak section rode up and over the southwest-facing side. Waveform modeling established that the faulting originated at a depth of with the