Pakistan Earthquake of October, 2005

 

The epicenter (red dot) imposed on digital terrain model near the Pakistan-India border.  Green is low elevations, white is high elevations.

 

 

 Google-Earth gets us close, satellite images superimposed on topography.  This is really rugged country, highways cling to hillsides prone to landslides.  The red dot is the epicenter, the red line a linear topographic feature that could be a thrust fault.

 

The 'fault' enters this oblique view from the upper right edge and exits center left.  The valley in the foreground could also be a thrust fault.  Thrust faults often come in imbricate sets (stacks - one fault sheet on top of another, with a slab of rock in between).  Most villages are probably on the floodplains or river terraces (old floodplains left high and dry when rivers cut their channels deep enough), right on the fault, where shaking is most severe.

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