Massive earthquake in Nepal moved Mount Everest
Watching from the other side of the globe, it can be hard to fathom the power of a massive earthquake like the magnitude 7.8 tremor that rocked Nepal on April 25, killing more than 8,500 people.
Here’s another way to think about it: The earthquake was so powerful that it physically shoved the world’s highest peak over by three centimetres, according to Chinese state media.
That data comes from “a satellite monitoring system” that the Chinese government set up in 2005 to observe the movement of the mountain, state media reported.
The mountain is constantly mov- ing, even without earthquakes.
“Monitoring data collected by the department from 2005 to 2015 shows that the mountain has been moving at a speed of four centimetres per year and has been growing by 0.3 centimetres annually,” state media said. The mountain’s slow-moving journey is caused by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which forces the ground upward. The same forces created the Himalayas.
The quake didn’t affect Everest’s height, but it reversed nine months of northeasterly movement in a matter of seconds, according to CNN. It also triggered several deadly avalanches on the mountain that killed 19 and trapped more than 100 others on the peak, bringing a swift end to the 2015 climbing season.
A second quake, which struck Nepal in May with a magnitude of 7.5, killing dozens and unleashing landslides, did not move the mountain, state media reported.
However, to put the mountain’s movement into perspective, consider that the region around Kathmandu — an area 120 kilometres long by 48 kilometres wide — rose by as much as a metre during the earthquake.
“That’s one of the reasons why Kathmandu has so much damage,” Tim Wright, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, told the Washington Post.