53 Killed As Powerful 7.1 Earthquake Strikes Tibet-Nepal Border, Tremors Felt In India
Earthquake Hits Tibet-Nepal Border, jolts Bihar, Delhi-NCR: A 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Tibet near the Nepal border on Tuesday morning.
According to news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), 53 people have been killed so far due to the tremors and consequent building collapses in the region. Several parts of India, including Bihar, Delhi-NCR, Assam, and West Bengal, too, received the jolts.
ccording to the National Center for Seismology (NCS) and the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences, the massive quake hit Tibet’s Xizang at 6:35 am at a depth of 10 km.
The epicentre was located at latitude 28.86 N and Longitude 87.51 E. According to NCS, four earthquakes jolted Xizang. The first measured 4.2 on the Richter scale at 5:41 am, the second and biggest (7.1) at 6:35 am, the third at 7:02 am of magnitude 4.7, and the fourth measuring 4.9 at 7:07.
The NCS has shared details of the few more subsequent earthquakes that have been hitting the area. However, those were not too strong. The high-altitude Dingri County in Xizang is home to around 62,000 people and is situated on Mount Everest. It has registered several building collapses amid sub-zero temperatures.
In several parts of Bihar, including Muzaffarpur, Motihari, Bettiah, Munger, Araria, Sitamarhi, Gopalganj, Vaishali, Nawada, and Nalanda, the tremors were felt for around 30 seconds. Sharing her experience with news agency ANI, Meera Adhikari, a resident of Kathmandu, said she was sleeping when the 7.1 earthquake struck.
She said, “The bed was shaking and I thought my child was moving the bed, I didn’t pay that much attention but the shaking of the window prompted me that it was an earthquake. I then hurriedly called my child and evacuated the house and came to the open ground.”
Strong Tremors In Nepal
As well as Kathmandu, areas around Lobuche in Nepal in the high mountains near Everest were also rattled by the tremor and aftershocks. “It shook quite strongly here, everyone is awake,” said government official Jagat Prasad Bhusal in Nepal’s Namche region, which lies nearer to Everest.
But no damage or deaths had been reported so far and security forces had been deployed, Nepali Home Minister spokesman Rishi Ram Tiwari said. Nepal is prone to earthquakes due to its location at the convergence of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The ongoing collision and subduction between these plates generate frequent seismic activity.
In 2015, nearly 9,000 people died and more than 22,000 were injured when a 7.8-magnitude quake struck Nepal, destroying more than half a million homes. Some tremors were felt in Bihar state in India but no injuries were reported.
Three people were killed and dozens injured after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck along the mountainous China-Kyrgyzstan border in January last year. A quake in December 2023 in northwest China killed 148 people and displaced thousands in Gansu province.
That quake was China’s deadliest since 2014, when more than 600 people were killed in southwestern Yunnan province. In the December 2023 earthquake, subzero temperatures made the aid operation launched in response even more challenging, with survivors huddled around outdoor fires to keep warm.