The December 26 earthquake in Aceh province of Indonesia has suddenly jolted everyone from slumber.

While slight tremors are something that all of us have been familiar with, the magnitude and devastative energy unleashed by the Aceh earthquake has made people sit up and take cognisance.

The Jammu and Kashmir earthquake on October 8, 2005 made it absolutely clear that frequency of quakes was not a matter of coincidence.

In fact, there have been reports of many small to medium-sized quakes this year. According to National Earthquake Information Center, US Geological Survey as many as 2,36,171 quakes were recorded. Of this the highest number of 13,106 quakes were in the category of 4.0 to 4.9.

According to Paul Tapponnier, a researcher at the Paris Institute for Planetary Physics (IPGP), "Earthquakes may seem random but the evidence shows that they come in clusters. One big temblor exerts stress on an adjoining part of the fault, bringing it that much closer to rupture."

The Jammu and Kashmir earthquake (7.6 on the Richter scale) caused large-scale devastation in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Jammu and Kashmir, killing approximately 86,000 people.

Like Indonesia (which sits on the Asia-Pacific rim) Kashmir lies in the area where the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates collide. Both are potential quake zones.

In fact, the fear was so strong that after the October 8 earthquake, the Himalayan region felt as many 450 aftershocks. So scared were people that for many days the people in PoK did not sleep indoors!