The study led by Luca Dal Zilio, a researcher at ETH Zurich, in collaboration with the California Institute of Technology, found groundbreaking new insight into how earthquakes are triggered and what catastrophic disasters lie ahead. There are a total of seven large tectonic plates and several smaller ones in the earth’s lithosphere, which is its outermost layers. These plates shift and collide which causes mountains and volcanoes to form, as well as earthquakes to happen.
The Indo-Gangetic plain and the Siwalik Himalaya, which lies under 500 million people, is one of the most vulnerable regions on earth, according to the research.
Mr Dal Zilio said: “Combining historical documents, new geologic data, and a cutting-edge numerical model, our study shows that the entire Himalaya is capable of producing very large earthquakes, with magnitude larger than 8.5 on the rector scale.
“The most dangerous part of the Nepalese area, which could be affected by the next earthquake, is located west of the capital, Kathmandu.”
The researcher added: “In that area, where there have been several earthquakes in the past, it is now almost 500 years that the energy that accumulates along this mega-fault has not been released.”
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The shocking results indicate if all the energy is released at once, it could cause an earthquake with a magnitude of more than 8.5.
The researchers found that magnitude 7 earthquakes release only part of the energy they collect.
The leftover energy is then transferred to other areas of the fault line.
In 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake ravaged Gorkha in Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people and injuring nearly 22,000.
Mr Dal Zilio said: ”A sequence of two or three partial ruptures of the fault creates the conditions for the propagation of an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 8.5.”
Along large fault lines, such as in the Himalayas, the amount of stress varies and accumulates faster in some regions and less in others which is down to the geometric effect of the fault itself.
The ETH Zurich researcher added: “The high-stress areas, which store elastic energy, produce earthquakes, while the areas with low-stress fault form energy barriers and cause the earthquake to stop.
“However, after two or three earthquakes, these barriers are reloaded from the residual energy of previous earthquakes and allow the next earthquake to propagate through these barriers for larger distances, thus generating an earthquake of magnitude higher than 8.5.”