Natural Disasters
Seismic activity has gone through the roof in last two months
Since December 2, 2016, there have been around 420 earthquakes of magnitude over 5 along all major continental plate boundaries
By Shreeshan Venkatesh
Published: Tuesday 03 January 2017
Over the past 12 months, there have been 77 earthquakes in the region with a magnitude of over 4.0. Of these, three registered magnitudes of over 6.5 on the Richter’s scale—two of which had epicentres in Myanmar and one near Imphal in Manipur, respectively.
The earthquake is a part of increased seismic activity that has been observed over the past two months or so. Since December 2, 2016, there have been around 420 earthquakes of magnitude over 5 along all major continental plate boundaries. The average number of earthquakes above magnitude 5 per month is close to only 120. The seismic activity over December and the beginning of January, thus marks a 3.5-fold increase.
Apart from region of highest seismic activity—“the ring of fire” formed on the fringes of the Pacific plate—medium and strong earthquakes have been reported from the Eurasian plate, the Filipino plate, Australian plate, North American plate, the Caribbean plate, South American plate, the Arabian plate and the Indian plate. It is not yet clear whether these events are linked in anyway.
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India Environment Portal Resources :
- Stochastic consideration of relationship between occurrences of earthquake and fluctuations in the radio wave propagation
- Global seismic temporal pattern and enhanced seismicity since 2000
- Strong motion data analysis of the 4 April 2011 Western Nepal earthquake (M 5.7) and its implications to the seismic hazard in the Central Himalaya
- Seismogenic active fault zone between 2005 Kashmir and 1905 Kangra earthquake meizoseismal regions and earthquake hazard in eastern Kashmir seismic gap
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