Kashmir could experience a magnitude 9 earthquake: Expert

Says big quake could block Jhelum, create a water bomb

Eminent geologist of the University of Colorado Roger Bilham has said that Kashmir is sufficiently stressed to host one or more M8 or greater earthquakes (M8.9 maximum), he was quoted by a Srinagar-based newspaper.

The intensity of such an earthquake would be more than that of the 2005 earthquake that struck both parts of Kashmir, Bilham said in a recent article.

According to Bilham paper, a large earthquake in Kashmir could theoretically create a large landslide blocking the Jhelum River. That would flood the entire Kashmir valley, and create a potential “weapon of mass destruction’, blowing up the damn, which is often the strategy for getting rid of such blockages, could release a “bomb” of water.

“The Kashmir region …could experience a magnitude 9 earthquake — several times larger than previously assumed. The revised risk estimate is worrying”, Bilham said on 7 December 2011 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Bilham speculated that perhaps 300,000 people might die in such an earthquake, not counting subsequent problems from political turmoil between India and Kashmir, or flooding.
Bilham says that researchers need to start more loudly broadcasting worst-case scenarios, so that earthquakes like those that hit Haiti and Japan don’t continually catch people by surprise. “All these things happen because we’re trained not to cry wolf,” says Bilham. “You have to plan for the worst case.”

The M7.8 (magnitude of 7.8 on Richter scale) earthquake that shook Nepal on April 25, 2015, was anticipated as early as in the early 1990s, by Bilham, citing a paper authored by him in 1994.