In South Asia, chances are you will be shaken and stirred by mother Earth more often than anywhere else.
According to the India meteorological department’s (IMD) list of significant earthquakes, there have been 163 tremors since November 17 last year. Of these, 106 happened in the Afghanistan-Myanmar belt with 73 of them in India.
These quakes varied in intensity from 2.9 on the Richter scale (Sirohi, Rajasthan) to the killer one in Nepal last Saturday (7.9).
Nepal experienced nine tremors during this phase while another four had epicenters beneath the border with India. The count does not include 65 aftershocks of the Saturday temblor, the last of them measuring 3.3 at 1:22pm IST on Tuesday.
“Nepal had a second quake of 6.6 intensity 34 minutes after the devastating one measuring 7.9. It was not an aftershock because there’s a difference of two longitudes between the epicenters of the two quakes,” an IMD officer said.
The distance between two longitudes is 69 miles or 111.045 km.
Most of the 106 quakes in India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Pakistan, besides areas bordering these countries, have occurred in seismic Zone 5 and Zone 4. India has four seismic zones – from the lowest level of seismicity associated with Zone 2 to the highest with Zone 5.Of the 73 quakes in India, 42 have been in the militancy-troubled North-east (37) and Jammu and Kashmir (five).