The destruction caused by an earthquake is related to the energy that it carries. The deeper the earthquake would have the lesser amount of energy that it brings to the surface because of the greater depth. But if see other additional factor which works in favor of the places in India.
Nepal seems to be near the centre of the Indian Plate "subducting" under the Himalayas. The Indian Plate is renowned for its speed moving northwards for millions of years. So, it will not stop moving and causing strong earthquakes any time soon.
On the other hand the movements under Afghanistan are not that pronounced by comparison.
Congratulations for your research on this important subject.
Michael Issigonis Thanks a lot for your wishes for research work and ideas, explanation for this topic. Apart from the collision and subductional history of Indian plate under the Eurasian plate that forms Himalays. But if we focus on dispersive energy regarding the depth of epicenter, it also seems to provide some ideas of massive destruction caused during these kind of earthquakes.
When we talk about Earthquake originating in Afghanistan or Far
away. Some of the factors that are coming to our mind :
1. Earthquake travels in waves from like any waves having crested and
toughs. What happens by the time they travel like 1200 or 1300 kms to
reach other place. The wavelength means the distance between
successive crests and toughs becomes elongated means larger in
distances. Therefore it easier to building that kind of forces.
2. If you imagine a normal sized building or structure. İt can very easily
reside either on the crest or on the troughs and therefore it is very
stable with continuous vibration.
3. On the other hand if the building structure is situated on successive
crest or trough or wavelength is very shorter so that the crest or trough
are very closer to each other it will coming with greater frequency or
faster phase then building would be unstable because of the part of the
building Is resting on crest and another part on the trough. That is why
it leads to move destruction or damages to the building.
4. Deeper earthquakes have less probability of aftershocks that following
them.
Really thanks for discussing this topic.
In all the terminologies of earthquake source parameters, the focal depth has a high impact for causing the destruction close to the epicentre distance. Shallow focused is the earthquake more is the destruction. This is the main reason that the shalow focused Nepal earthquake (only 15 km depth) caused heavy destruction compared to the deep focused Hindu Kush (~ 200 km focal death) of 2015 inspite that both these earthquakes are having near equal magnitude size.
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