Earthquakes in Neola have been charted foe at least 700 years, and this one as an exact repeat of a 1934 event that killed 16,00 people in Nepal and Northern India. Linked directly to the formation of te Himalayas, the location of the last Eararthquake has been noted as unsurprisingly an yet the exact time of the event remains unpredictable.
Hundreds of millions of years ago , what is now the Indian subcontinent broke off from ancient supercontinent called Gondwanaland and began its inexorable drift northward, smashing into the Eurasian tectonic plate tens of millions of years ago and giving rise to the Himalayan mountain range.That collision continues today, with the Indian platesliding beneath the Eurasian plate at a rate of about 2 inches ( 0 to 50 millimeters ) per year.
The collision releases energy but also stores a significant amount in the form of a spring. Sometimes, energy stored in the spring gets big enough to slip catastrophically, releasing all tht pent-up strain and generating shaking strong enough to destroy buildings and kill people over a huge area. Earthquakes such as the last one ae thus not only the results of the immediate clash of tectonic plates, but also through the release of pent up energy.
Opinions arising both prior and subcontinent to the latest quake point out that the scale of the shocks is neither unexpected nor surprising. Rather, a team of researchers only weeks prior to the catastrophic event. Laurent Bollinger, from the CEA research agency in France, and his colleagues, uncovered the historical pattern of earthquakes during fieldwork in Nepal last month, and anticipated a mojor earthquake in exactly the location wher Saturday`s big tremor took place.
This quake follows the same pattern as two big tremors that rocked the region over 700 years ago, and tresults froma domino effect of strain transferring along the fult line: this seems to be what happens in 1255. Over the folloewing 89 years, strain accumulated in the neighbouring years, strain accumulated in the neighbouring westerly segment of fault, finally rupturing in 1344.
The extreme strain occasionally causes raptures in the region`s crust - and the magnitude- 7.8 earthquake that ripped through Nepal`s Kathmandu Valley on Sturday was the unfounate result.
"We could see that both Kathmandu and Pokhara would now be particularly exposed to earthquakes rupturing the main fault, where it likely last did in 1344, between the two cities", explained Paul Tappponniering, from the eEarth Observation Singapore, who was working with Bollinger. At the same time, Bollinger also started that "Early calculations suggest that Saturday`s magnitude - 7.8 earthquake is priably not big enough to rapture all the way to the surface, o there is still likely to be more strain stored, and we should probably except another big earthquake to the west and south of this one in the coming decades".
