16.10.2015: In the current issue of Frontiers in Earth Science a team of scientists presents newest satellite radar data that document a rise of the Himalayan Mountains of more than 2 meters of an area of more than 7000 square kilometers that followed the devastating Nepal quake from April 2015. Stress field models reveal that more earthquakes may follow.

On April 25, Nepal was struck by a devastating earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8. A sudden movement of about 5 meters occured at a fracture zone in a depth of 10 kilometers, located directly below the capital of Kathmandu. By combining newest European, Japanese, and Canadian satellite data, an international team of scientists under GFZ lead was able to exactly reconstruct the movement of the ground. It was furthermore possible to reconstruct the rise and subsidence of the Himalayan Mountains by computer modeling. An area of more than 7000 square kilometers (an area three times as large as the Saarland) was risen by about 2 meters directly following the main quake, while an area in the north of at least the same size was subsided.

Areas around the fracture zone experienced an increase in shear stress that resulted in further quakes, an aftershock on Mai 12 reached a magnitude of 7.3. "In several regions shear stress is still high and will only be released by further movements of the ground”, says Dr. Thomas Walter, GFZ section Physics of Earthquakes and Volcanoes, an author of the article. If further quakes are to follow or if the sheer stress is unloaded by less dangerous processes is currently unclear.

Faqi Diao, Thomas R. Walter, Mahdi Motagh, Pau Prats-Iraola, Rongjiang Wang, Sergey V. Samsonov, 2015. The 2015 Gorkha earthquake investigated from radar satellites: Slip and stress modeling along the MHT. Frontiers in Earth Science 3:65. doi: 10.3389/feart.2015.00065