A research study rings alarm on a massive natural calamity in eastern India and neighboring Bangladesh that may put lives of 14 crore people at risk.
According to the study published in the journal – Nature Geo-science, a ‘Megathrust’ earthquake will shake Bangladesh. Even though the event is not classified as imminent, the study hold it to be inevitable as sections of the earth’s crust pressing against one another.
According to Michael Steckler – the lead author of the research and a geophysicist at Columbia University in New York – a time frame cannot be drawn as when the quake my occur.
“No estimate on when such a quake may occur is possible without additional research,” he said.
Some 140 million (14 crore) people live within 62 miles (100 km) of the potential epicenter in eastern India and in Bangladesh, the world’s most densely populated country and among the poorest, the study said.
Due to unscientific and unabated construction practices in Bangladesh, lives and properties of people staying in the region will be heavily affected by the catastrophe.
As per the study, an earthquake of strength 8 to 9 in Richter scale will be generated in the epicenter.
Mud that has accumulated some 12 miles (19 km) deep in the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers could shake “like gelatin, and liquefy in many places, sucking in buildings, roads and people,” said co-author Syed Humayun Akhter, a geologist at Dhaka University, in a statement.
The damage could be so severe as to render Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, unlivable, he added. The study also says that Eastern India will not spared from the sever aftermath of the mega-quake.
“The effect would extend to Myanmar and beyond,” says the study. The study says that the mega-earthquake will affect geographical landscapes of eastern and north-eastern India, thus causing giant deluges and landslides.
Bangladesh and eastern India lie on the border line of two tectonic plates (known as subduction zone) which have been pressuring against each other for the last 400 years and since then strain has been building.
One plate is moving under the other deep beneath the surface, and two plates are stuck together at the upper layers of the fault. The plates are covered in layers of sediment more than 20 meters thick and that makes the region vulnerable to deadly quakes.
