More Earthquakes To Come?

Human lives are more valuable, but it still breaks my heart to see century-old structures crumble like that.

Nepal’s earthquake which struck almost a week ago has devastated the country. More than 4,000 people have been killed and many ancient monuments in the city were destroyed. Many questions come to come in the aftermath. Was the country developing too quickly without paying due attention to the quality of its buildings? Have the Nepalese people become complacent even when earthquakes are common in the region? Many are now pointing fingers at the government, but the important questions to ask are – when will it happen again and what needs to be done to prevent a similar tragedy of this magnitude?

Well, I don’t trust most of them most of the time, but some experts have warned that earthquakes are going to be more frequent due to climate changes. Evidence from the end of the last Ice Age has already shown that the planet’s uneasy web of seismic faults – cracks in the crust like the one that runs along the Himalayas – are very sensitive to the small pressure changes brought by change in the climate. And a sensitive volcano or seismic faultline is a very dangerous one.

Apparently, melting ice and shifting sea levels are going to wobble the earth’s crust and on an oceanic scale, this may trigger earthquakes. Again, this is just a hypothesis, but it certainly seems plausible. Time for the world to pay greater attention to climate changes.

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