Study rings quake alarm for U’khand

A 700-YEAR-OLD ‘FAULT’ BENEATH THE STATE HAS REACHED A TIPPING POINT, A LARGE INDOAUSTRALIAN TEAM OF EXPERTS CONCLUDED

NEW DELHI: New research partly funded by the Indian government to forecast earthquakes have put out a grim prediction: a great quake never seen in centuries could strike Uttarakhand and an area home to 10 million people.

That’s because a 700-yearold ‘fault’ beneath the state has reached a tipping point, a large Indo-Australian team of experts have concluded after grueling lab and on-site investigations, including scouring three river-beds – that of Bhagirathi, Alaknanda and Kali.

The projected quake should match magnitudes of some the biggest quakes in the region: an 1833 tremor, a 1905 one in Kangra, the 1934 Nepal-Bihar quake and Assam’s massive 1950 tremblor.

Notice of an impending earthquake may be scary, but it isn’t such a bad idea. Even seconds of advanced quake warning can reduce loss of lives with proper awareness, according to guidelines of the US Geological Survey. A 7.8 quake on April 25 in Nepal killed more than 7,000 people.

Quakes can’t be predicted, much less to the exact moment. But by using complex modern science, geologists can marry data sets from past quakes with slow changes in landscape patterns. Along with hundreds of other things, such as examining river-beds, hill gradients and erosion rates, they can tell where a tremor is due. That’s what the 10-member team did.

In two related studies -published in the US journals Lithosphere and JGR -- a bevy of scientists from the two nations arrived at a seemingly simple but common conclusion. Perched precariously on the edges of two colliding continental plates, Uttarakhand is “primed” for a “large” tremor, which denotes magnitudes invariably upwards of 7.

The team was multilaterally funded by the India’s ministry of earth sciences, department of science and technology as well as by the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund.

It homed in on a 400-km “central seismic gap” at the base of the Himalaya, running through “hinterland Uttarakhand”.

“Décollement beneath Uttarakhand provides a sufficiently large and coherent fault segment capable of hosting a large earthquake. It is the most prominent gap not to have ruptured in about 500 years,” CP Rajendran of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore and one of the authors said. CONT’D ON P6