The city of Shigatse in China’s Tibet region is close to two tectonic plates and therefore strongly affected by earthquakes, Professor Mark Allen from the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University says.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Now, this was one of China's deadliest earthquakes in years.
00:04Why is this region so susceptible to them?
00:08Hello.
00:09As your report has said, this particular region sits close to a boundary between two tectonic
00:17plates, India and Asia, which are still converging with each other at about 40 millimetres a
00:23year.
00:25That doesn't sound much, but over geological time, that's a rapid rate of motion, and that
00:31has to be accommodated somehow by slip on faults, which riddle the earth's plates.
00:38And it's when those faults are moving quickly that we get the release of energy that we
00:42call an earthquake.
00:44So whilst we can't usefully and precisely predict when any individual fault will move
00:50and produce a disastrous earthquake, we do have a good picture overall of which areas
00:56are prone to earthquakes, and we can make general forecasts which areas are likely to
01:02see earthquakes in the future.