Why There Are Frequent Earthquakes In Delhi-NCR

Table of Contents

RICHTER SCALE

The Richter scale is a mathematical measure of earthquake intensity.
Discovered in 1935 by Charles Richter.
The intensity of earthquake per scale increases by 10 times.
g. Earthquake measuring 3on the Richter scale would increase 10 times on 4 Richter scale.

According to the risk of earthquake, the country is divided into four parts, zone-2, zone-3, zone-4 and zone five.
Of these, the least threatened is Zone 2 and the highest risked is Zone-5.
All the states of North-East, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand & parts of Himachal Pradesh fall under Zone-5. Delhi falls in Zone-4,

The reason for this lies in Earth’s distant past, when the Indian tectonic plate smashed into the Eurasian plate with such force that the crust folded upwards around the area of the collision, forming the Himalayan mountain range.
Indian plate hasn’t come to rest, even though some 55 million years have passed, and is still moving into the
Asian plate at5-6 cm per year.
This is a very high speed for the plates of any continent to move.

Delhi-NCR comes under high risk zone.
Fault lines are present in Delhi-NCR.
According to the macro seismic zoning map of India, around 30% of Delhi falls under Zone V(very high risk), while the rest is under Zone IV (high risk).
In areas where there is a high risk of earthquakes, stress in the lower surfaces of the earth increases in hundreds of years.
This is caused by the movement of tectonic plates, but the effect of stress is not only sudden but slowly.
First the earth remains calm for a long time, then the layers start moving for some time and this process is repeated again and again.

There’s no clear answer since earthquakes still cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty.
Questionautomaticallyarises:If the crust in this part of the world can slowly release all of its tension,there wouldn’t have to beamega-quake in the future, right?
This line of reasoning makes sense but the problem is that the part o f the crust in question contains just to omuch energy for a big earth quake to not
In a paper published inDecember 2013,
“The ~500 km long ‘Central Himalayan seismic gap’ of northwest India is the largest section of the Himalaya that has not experienced a very large earthquakein the past 200-500 years.”
A seismic gap refers to the portion of a fault that hasn’t experienced quakes in a while though it should have,
Indicating it’s building strain that it could later release
in one large burst.
The last time the Central Himalayan gap (CHG) experienced a quake was in 1803, and before that in 1505.

Delhi has developed in a very clumsy way.
The constructionof colonies here is quite dense.
Two-thirdsof the capital’s population live in illegally
constructed houses.
A few years ago, the building collapsed in Laxmi Nagar without earthquake raises a questions over the quality of the buildings.
Areason the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi come under the maximum danger.