Sydney--The earthquake that devastated Nepal and left thousands of people dead shifted the earth beneath Kathmandu by up to several metres south, but the height of Mount Everest likely stayed the same, experts said Tuesday.
The massive 7.8-magnitude quake on Saturday was the Himalayan nation's deadliest disaster in more than 80 years, killing more than 4,300 people and causing massive destruction.
According to early seismological data obtained from sound waves which travel through Earth after an earthquake, the ground beneath the capital Kathmandu may have moved about three metres (10 feet) southward, said University of Cambridge tectonics expert James Jackson.
His analysis was similar to that of Sandy Steacy, head of the physical sciences department at the University of Adelaide.
"It's likely that the earthquake occurred on the Himalayan Thrust fault, a plate boundary that separates the northern moving Indian sub-continent from Eurasia," said Steacy.
"The fault dips about 10 degrees to the north-northeast. The relative movement across the fault zone was on the order of three metres at its greatest, just north of Kathmandu."
The fault lies between two tectonic plates -- one bearing India pushing northward into a plate carrying Europe and Asia at a rate of about two centimetres (0.8 inches) per year -- the process that created the Himalayas in the first place.
Mark Allen, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Durham in Britain, explained that the rocks on top of the fault moved southwards over the rocks underneath it, causing an overall shortening of the Earth's crust in the region.
It remains unclear whether the shifts may be large enough to necessitate adjustments to high-precision world maps.
AFP
