HINDU KUSH & WEST HIMALAYAS

Introduction

The Hindu Kush region of north-eastern Afghanistan is at the western end of the Himalayan mountain ranges, as shown in the attached Google Earth Pro image. The Hindu Kush earthquake of 2015 struck at a depth of 231 km and affected a wide region of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. At least 399 people were killed (mainly in Pakistan) and 2536 injured in this seismologically extremely active region due to the Indian Plate pushing under the Eurasian Plate - the same tectonic action that has produced the Himalayas (October 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake - Wikipedia).

The study zone for the graphs below has a radius of 350 km around the epicentre of the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake. A USGS catalogue search (Search Earthquake Catalog) reveals that since 1900 this 350-km zone has endured 17 earthquakes of M 7.0-7.8, while increasing the zone to a radius of 500 km added only three more events. However, one of them was the deadliest regional earthquake - the M 7.6 "Kashmir Earthquake" of Oct 2015  (2005 Kashmir earthquake - Wikipedia) which may have killed over 100,000. Although it occurred only some 378 km southeast of the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake as assessed from the Google Earth Pro image below, the author bases separate studies of regional earthquake dynamics centred on this Kashmir region.