Islamabad, other cities receive 67 aftershocks in 24 hours

14 Oct, 2005

Pakistan's seismic and weather experts have recorded over 67 aftershocks in the last 24 hours till Thursday, morning, two of them were recorded with over 4 magnitude on the Richter scale.
The federal capital and other parts of the country including all those areas which were jolted on October 8, received shocks on Thursday morning at 9.06 am with the magnitude of 4.5 on Richter scale.
An aftershock received at 1.23 am (between the night of Wednesday and Thursday) was 5.6 on and its epicenter was 135 kilometers (83 miles) north of Islamabad.
The fresh shocks, jolted the already damaged buildings however no new damage was reported.
Don Blakeman, geophysicist at the US Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center said, the aftershocks will go on for months, possibly years.
The major earthquake occurred on Saturday October 8, with magnitude of 7.6 on Richter Scale with a depth of 10 km (6.2 miles) and its epicenter was 95 km (60 miles) NE of Islamabad was the result of active faults in northern Pakistan and adjacent parts of India and Afghanistan.
These plates of subcontinent moving northward at a rate of about 40 mm/yr (1.6 inches/yr) collided with the Eurasian continent.
This collision is causing uplift that produced highest mountain peaks in the world including the Himalayas, the Karakoram, the Pamir and the Hindu Kush. As the Indian plate moves northward, it is being subducted or pushed beneath the Eurasian plate. Much of the compressional motion between these two colliding plates has been and continues to be accommodated by slip on a suite of major thrust faults that are at the Earth's surface in the foothills of the mountains and dip northward.
These include the Main Frontal thrust, the Main Central thrust, the Main boundary thrust, and the Main Mantle thrust. These thrust faults have a sinuous trace as they are across the foothills in northern India and into northern Pakistan.
The modern active faults are actually a system of faults comprising a number of individual fault traces.
In the rugged mountainous terrain, it is difficult to identify and map all of the individual thrust faults, but the overall tectonic style of the modern deformation is clear in the area of the earthquake; north- and north-east-directed compression is producing thrust faults.
About 10 km south-west of the earthquake's epicenter near Muzaffarabad, active thrustfaults that strike northwest-southeast have deformed and warped pleistocene alluvial-fan surfaces into anticlinal ridges.
The strike and dip direction of these thrust faults is compatible with the style of faulting indicated by the focal mechanism from the nearby earthquake of 7.6 magnitude.

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