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Journalism of Courage
By: D Srinagesh, Chief Scientist, NGRI
NGRI has a long history of carrying out scientific investigations on earthquakes. Precursor study is one of the obvious areas of earthquake research but there are a number of other studies that enrich our knowledge of earthquakes.
Earthquakes are one of the least understood natural occurrences. We do not have much information about the events that have happened in the past. Our project, which has about 20 scientists and equal number of students, tries to fill that gap. Earthquakes, especially the big ones, leave imprints that are evident even after centuries. We are trying to find these imprints in different parts of the Himalayas and, using carbon-dating methods, trying to put a date on them.
Similar kind of studies have been done by others as well. A group of scientists had concluded, after extensive studies in the Northeast, that events like the great Shillong earthquake of 1897 had a recurrence cycle of about 400-600 years in that region.
If one scans the global seismicity catalogues for the last hundred years, the big earthquakes of magnitude 8 and above do not happen more than once a year on an average globally. However, the actual location of such large earthquakes occurring in near future cannot be predicted.
Seismology is a very young science. The advent of high-fidelity seismological instruments, large data and sophisticated computational facilities is leading us to understand the earthquake processes. It needs to be built up and that is what we are trying to do.
