Alarm in Nepal after Tibet quake
The Xigatse earthquake coincided with anniversaries of 1934 and 2015, and were reminders to be better preparedThe new year 2025 started literally with a bang. The 7.1M jolt in Xigatse on Tuesday swayed buildings in Kathmandu 400km away, and coincided with the approaching 91st anniversary of the 1934 Great Earthquake.
The National Earthquake Safety Day on 15 January commemorates the 1934 8.3M disaster that killed 10,000 people in Kathmandu, leaving many collapsed buildings. Thousands of people of Kathmandu took shelter in tents in Tundikhel as aftershocks rattled the country (pictured).
This year is also the tenth anniversary of the 2015 7.8M Gorkha Earthquake that killed 9,000 people in central Nepal. These are all warnings about the ‘seismic gap’ in western Nepal where there has not been a major quake for more than 500 years.
That one that is overdue, and for which the country is woefully unprepared. Despite the distance, an 8M earthquake will not spare Kathmandu and other urban centres.
“It will be catastrophic, and yet, there is no preparedness among the public or policymakers despite increased awareness,” warns Surya Narayan Shrestha of the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET Nepal) which has been involved in retrofitting public buildings.
“The warning of the 2015 earthquake was not heeded, it has not translated into building safer or enforcing building codes,” Shrestha adds.
There have been a series of smaller earthquakes in Jajarkot and Bajura in the past year, and it is an indication of the lack of preparedness that even moderate quakes like Jajarkot killed so many and caused so much damage.
The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) in its Emergency Preparedness and Response Assessment quantified earthquake preparedness levels in 23 municipalities. Kathmandu nearly failed with just 39.8%, while Doti in western Nepal scored the lowest at 11%.
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‘This means that most criteria for emergency preparedness and response systems in Nepal are weak,’ stated the 2022 assessment. It underlined severe lack of search and rescue equipment for different hazards, dysfunctional emergency operations center network, and poorly constructed houses and public buildings.
Western Nepal has seen a swarm of smaller quakes in the past year, and this could either be releasing some of the tectonic tension, or a warning of a big one to come. The National Earthquake Monitoring and Research Center recorded 10 earthquakes between 4.1-5.2M from 17 December to 3 January, most of them in western Nepal.
“We need thousands of these minor tremors or hundreds of moderate 6M earthquakes a year to be able to release the stress that has accumulated beneath western Nepal,” explains Anil Pokhrel, who heads the NDRRMA.
Today, Nepal’s seismic risk is magnified by climate breakdown. Rising temperature is melting glaciers, and turning them into lakes dammed by fragile moraines. A megaquake in the Himalaya increases the risk of multiple Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) downstream.
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A few hours before two small glacial lakes burst destroying the village of Thame in August last year, a 4.5M earthquake had struck nearby on the Tibetan Plateau. The Journal of Basic and Applied Geomorphology in February 2023 published a study highlighting how earthquakes exacerbate climate-driven cascade processes of the glacial lakes failure in the Himalaya.
‘Global warming drives glacial retreat, and uncover loose sediment that can be mobilized as debris flows, triggering small glacial lake outbursts in high mountain regions. Sediment generated from earthquake-induced landslides exacerbates the flow magnitude in a valley to increase the disaster risk,’ the paper warns.
Of the 47 high-risk lakes on glaciers that threaten Nepal, 25 are in China and feed tributaries of the Arun and Bhote Kosi that flow into Nepal. Pokhrel says he initially feared that the Xigatse earthquake on Tuesday would cause glacial lakes in Tibet to burst.
He adds, “It is important to be prepared for cascading, complex disasters that combine the climate crisis with earthquakes, permafrost melting, GLOFs, landslides.”
Pokhrel was in Thame in August, and says, “The two lakes that burst were the size of Olympic swimming pools and yet managed to wipe out half the village. We have lakes 600 times bigger which are now at a higher risk of bursting in an earthquake due to climate breakdown.”
writer
Sonia Awale is Executive Editor of Nepali Times where she also serves as the health, science and environment correspondent. She has extensively covered the climate crisis, disaster preparedness, development and public health -- looking at their political and economic interlinkages. Sonia is a graduate of public health, and has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong.