As per a new research, tension between two tectonic plates is increasing beneath the densely populated country Bangladesh where the world’s largest river delta lies and if it turns into an earthquake, it will have the capacity to turn the area into ruins.
If this prediction turns into reality, minimum 140 million people living in this region will suffer severely and the destruction will be caused not only by the shaking of the earth but also from the change in path of rivers and because of the decrease in land level, as it is already near to sea level.
This newly found threat lies in a subduction zone where a tectonic place which is basically one section of earth’s crust is slowly moving under the other tectonic plate.
The biggest earthquakes of the earth have taken place in such types of zones; this include the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake and tsunami which took the lives of nearly 2,30,000 people, the 2011 Tohku earthquake and tsunami of Japan which not only killed 20,000 but also resulted in Fukushima nuclear disaster.
However, till now these types of zones were beneath the ocean only, but this time, it is beneath the land which increases the threat by manifold.
In the opinion of lead author of research study, Michael Steckler, who is also a geophysicist at Columbia Univeristy, this tension has been building for minimum time-span of 400 yrs and if we look at the records, there has been no major earthquake in this time-period. However, whenever the earthquake will come now, its magnitude will be more than 8.2 and can touch the magnitude of 9.
Researchers say that since tens of millions of years, a huge place which comprises of India and a major portion of Indian Ocean has been moving northeasterly into Asia. This movement has led the rise of Himalayas to the north and as a consequence, event like 2015 Nepal Earthquake took place which killed nearly 9,000 innocents.
Bangladesh and eastern India sit atop a landscape vulnerable even to moderate earthquakes: the vast delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, researchers said.
The land of Bangladesh and eastern India is above the huge delta of Ganges and Brahmaputra, putting the land at risk even against the moderate earthquakes. In simple words, it is just a mountain of mud with depth of 12 miles, which covers the subduction zone.
The study coauthor Syed Humayun Akhter, a geologist at Dhaka University, says that this underlying muddy substance will increase the effect of shaking and many places will liquefy resulting in the suction of buildings, roads and people.
James Ni, a seismologist at New Mexico State University says, “We don’t have a good idea of its geometry, we don’t know how far it goes down.” He further added that this earthquake will affect not only Bangladesh and eastern India but also Myanmar and beyond that too.
The study and its findings appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience.