Kabul: A powerful earthquake measuring 6.4 magnitude on the Richter Scale struck Afghanistan on Wednesday. According to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC), the earthquake was at a depth of 121 km. The tremors were felt in the National Capital Region (NCR) in India and also in Pakistan’s Islamabad.
As per the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), Afghanistan remains highly vulnerable to natural disasters, including seasonal flooding, landslides and earthquakes. According to UNOCHA, these frequent earthquakes in Afghanistan cause damage to vulnerable communities, which are already grappling with decades of conflict and under-development and have left them with little resilience to cope with multiple simultaneous shocks.
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Afghanistan has a history of powerful earthquakes, with the Hindu Kush Mountain range being a geologically active area where quakes occur every year, as per the Red Cross. Afghanistan sits on numerous fault lines between the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates, with a fault line also running directly through Herat.
When earthquakes strike, their magnitude is important but also their depth, with shallow earthquakes wrecking more damage than those deeper into the Earth. Afghanistan is unfortunately prone to these shallow earthquakes, due to the region’s tectonic plates often slipping past one another, as opposed to colliding directly.
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