The 2015 Nepal Earthquake

 by Attish Das

On Saturday 25^th April, 2015, at precisely 11:56 a staggering 7.8 Magnitude (on the moment magnitude scale) earthquake in struck Nepal. The epicenter was located just east of the Gorkha District at Barpak, 85km (53mi) north-west of Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. Unfortunately, there were 8,964 casualties and 21,952 injuries across the area, and an avalanche triggered by this event killed 22, meaning that it was the deadliest incident on the mountain. Another avalanche was also triggered in the Langtang valley, where 250 people were reported missing.

This earthquake occurred because of the plate boundary between the Eurasian plate and the Indian plate. The type of plate boundary here is a convergent collision plate boundary, where two continental plates push against each other and collide. The continental crust thickens and lifts into fold mountains. The pressure built up by these two plates causes the plates to crack up into faults which triggers earthquakes close to the Earth’s surface; in this case the depth of the earthquake was 8.2km (5.1mi).

A series of aftershocks followed the main event, at 15 – 30-minute intervals. An example is a 6.9 Magnitude earthquake on the next day, 26th April in the same area.

As of 24 May 2016, 459 aftershocks had occurred with different epicenters and magnitudes equal to or above a magnitude of 4 (out of which 51 aftershocks are equal to or above a magnitude of 5 and 5 aftershocks above 6) and more than 20,000 aftershocks less than a Magnitude of 4.

One United Nations (UN) report mentioned that more than eight million people) were affected by the earthquake and its effects. The earthquake produced landslides that devastated rural villages and some of the most densely populated parts of the city of Kathmandu.