Latest news with #Indian-Eurasian
New Indian Express
3 days ago
- Science
- New Indian Express
200 earthquakes shake Himalayas annually for decades, most go unnoticed: Study
ALMORA: The northern Himalayan region has experienced an average of 200 earthquakes annually for the past 27 years, a Kumaon University study has revealed. While most tremors are mild, two to three quakes exceeding magnitude 4 strike each year, highlighting constant seismic unrest in the world's youngest and highest mountain range. Led by Dr Santosh Joshi of Kumaon University's Geology Department, the research underscores continuous tectonic activity. Uttarakhand, especially Pithoragarh, is frequently affected. Shallow epicentres (10–20 km) indicate stress release closer to the surface. Dr Joshi's comprehensive study, Active Tectonics of Garhwal-Kumaon Himalaya, was conducted under the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences. He analysed earthquake data from 1991 to 2018. 'During this 27-year period, approximately 4,200 earthquake tremors, ranging from magnitude 2 to over 4, were recorded across the northern Himalayan belt,' Dr Joshi stated. 'This data offers an unprecedented long-term perspective, confirming it as highly tectonically active.' The Himalayas result from the Indian-Eurasian plate collision. This subduction builds immense stress, released as earthquakes. Dr Joshi's research focused on the Main Central Thrust (MCT), also known as the Himalayan Seismic Belt, a major fault.
Sky News
28-03-2025
- Climate
- Sky News
Myanmar quake: Power of tectonic plates almost impossible to imagine until it's suddenly released
The world's highest mountain range - the Himalayas - is a testament to the power of plate tectonics. Forced upwards by the gradual northward push of the Indian plate into the Eurasian plate. It's a power that's almost impossible to imagine until just a tiny fraction of it is suddenly released. And that's what happened just six miles beneath the feet of 1.2 million people living in Myanmar's city of Mandalay and surrounding settlements. A fault line along that Indian-Eurasian plate boundary runs almost directly beneath the city. Over decades, as the plates grind past each other, tension builds up in the subsurface rock. When it finally gives, an earthquake is the result. How powerful was Friday's quake? Such strike-slip faults, as they are known, do not generate the world's most powerful earthquakes. That dubious honour goes to subduction zones in places like Sumatra and Japan that generate the magnitude 9 earthquakes that caused the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 or the Tohoku tsunami of 2011. A magnitude 7.7 quake is still extremely powerful and destructive if it occurs shallow in the Earth's crust and close to population centres. Friday's quake did both. Recent history has an important role to play too. Large earthquakes in this region happen every decade or so. But the last one of this size in the Sagaing region was in 1946. That predates the development of modern earthquake building codes. Reconstruction in Mandalay and beyond after that event will have resulted in buildings constructed vulnerable to collapse from shaking of this magnitude - and possibly already weakened by previous events.
