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India may be vulnerable to worse earthquakes

In a report, posted on the Academic Press site on the Internet, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science News Service, scientists have voiced fears that the Indian subcontinent may become increasingly vulnerable to earthquakes.

The earth's crust fractures, says the AAAS update, when tectonic plates glide past each other. And according to the report, experts are of the view that, 'the Indian subcontinent has been torn, stretched, and strained by aeons of plate tectonic jostling, and that has created weak spots in the crust'. Hence, the crust is being stretched and is prone to rupture.

Further, they feel there is no indication of when or how an earthquake can strike because the subcontinent as a whole is slowly being thrust northwards in the direction of Central Asia. In the process the Himalayas are being jostled upwards and the subcontinent is being squashed, like a rumpled hanky.

Tectonic surveys, the article says, have dubbed the Gujarat earthquake as an intra-plate earthquake, the fifth and most malevolent of such a species, that have occurred in India since 1965. They warn that in the future India may have many more intra-plate earthquakes with disastrous consequences. They cite that if an earthquake takes place at the very susceptible northeastern edge of the plate, where it intersects with the Himalayas, the consequences could be dire.

It would affect several of India's large, densely populated cities situated on rivers in the northeast, even New Delhi. They predict a very grim scenario.

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