Dhaka: A huge earthquake may be building beneath Bangladesh, which can turn urban areas in eastern India into “ruins”, a new study has warned.
Scientists said they have new evidence of increasing strain where two tectonic plates underlie the world’s largest river delta.
They estimate that at least 140 million people in the region could be affected if the boundary ruptures; the destruction could come not only from the direct results of shaking, but changes in the courses of great rivers, and in the level of land already perilously close to sea level.
The newly identified threat is a subduction zone, where one section of earth’s crust, or a tectonic plate, is slowly thrusting under another. All of earth’s biggest known earthquakes occur along such zones; these include the Indian Ocean quake and tsunami that killed some 230,000 people in 2004, and the 2011 Tohoku quake and tsunami off Japan, which swept away more than 20,000 and caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
