Did Nepal earthquake put off a '30 times worse' catastrophe?

Though the real scale of the death and devastation wrecked by Saturday’s earthquake is yet to be fully fathomed, seismologists who have been waiting with trepidation for the Himalayas to deliver a mega-temblor will tell you that the 7.9 magnitude (Richter’s scale) event - epicentered northwest of the Nepal capital Kathmandu - may have been a minor "blessing".

Major earthquakes – with a magnitude of eight and above – capable of impacting the lives of millions and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths all the way from the epicenter to Delhi and beyond, have long been predicted to hit the Himalayas. Seismologists have been consistently warning ruling regimes in every Himalayan nation, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan and Myanmar, that extraordinary strains are accumulating along the entire length of the mountain chain.

The entire mountainous foundation is shaky and unpredictable. Precise research, based on data gleaned from global positioning technology, has shown the presence of a roughly 50km wide "micro-seismicity belt" running along the west to east length of the Himalayas. This, geoscientists like the former Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG) director VC Thakur believe, is clear proof that incalculable tension, proportional to millions of megatons of energy, is building in subterranean rock formations because the Himalayas – born some 50 million years ago when the Indian subcontinent began pushing against and eventually driving itself under the larger Eurasian landmass – are still "tectonically active". This is to say that the northward sub-continental movement (around 2.5cm every year) still continues and generates innumerable (usually unrecorded) minor tremors (micro-seismicity) between larger earthquakes as the rocks move to relieve the strain.

But seismologists have, for some time, believed that the Indian sub-continental plate (or tectonic plate) has become "locked" along the east-west Himalayan axis. The rapidly accumulating stress is sufficient to cause a sudden, and impossible to predict, break in the tectonic plate.

Such an event could potentially trigger a quake between the magnitude of eight and nine. A temblor that has a magnitude of nine would be more than 30 times as devastating as the earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday. While it is true that the 7.9 magnitude seismic event caused widespread suffering and grief, experts say that, even in a minuscule measure, the earthquake and its unending succession of aftershocks, may well have served to temporarily put off the predicted mega-temblor.