NEW DELHI: A major earthquake 7.1 struck 93 km northeast of LobucheNepal, at 6.35 am IST on Tuesday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported. Tremors were also felt in Bihar and several parts of northern India.
Lobuche is located in Nepal, east of the capital Kathmandu. It is situated near the Khumbu Glacier, about 150 kilometers east of Kathmandu and 8.5 kilometers southwest of Everest Base Camp.
The magnitude 7.1 earthquake was centered in China’s Tibet region, at a depth of about 10 kilometers (6 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said.
China’s earthquake monitoring agency recorded a magnitude of 6.8. The average altitude in the area around the epicenter is about 4,200 meters (13,800 feet), according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
A day earlier, on Monday, a magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck Afghanistan at 12:47 hrs IST, the National Center for Seismology (NCS) reported. The earthquake occurred at a depth of 120 kilometers, with the epicenter recorded at latitude 36.55 N and longitude 67.86 E.
Nepal, according to experts, is exposed to earthquakes because it is located in a seismically active zone, making earthquakes inevitable.
The last time Nepal felt such a strong earthquake was on April 25, 2015, when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed about 9,000 people, the worst in Nepal’s history, and damaged about 1 million structures. The previous deadliest earthquake to hit the region was in 1934, with more than 8,000 deaths.