HIMACHAL PRADESH,INDIA, July 27, 2016 (by Tia Ghose, Live Science News): A damaged and clamped pillar at the Lakshmi Narayan Temple in the Chamba region of India is a sign of a past earthquake. The damage likely occurred hundreds of years ago, meaning the nearby fault has had a lot of time to build up stress. Past earthquakes that damaged ancient temples perched high in the Himalayas could be harbingers of dangerous quakes to come, new research suggests. The area, a picturesque, tourist mountain town in Himachal Pradesh, is sandwiched between two regions where catastrophic earthquakes have killed tens of thousands of people. But researchers didn’t think this area was at high risk until now. The findings suggest that the region is overdue for a major earthquake.
The area near the Himalayas is laced with terrifying faults. In 2005, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake shook a region of Pakistan called Azad Kashmir, killing 86,000 people and displacing millions. And in 1905, a magnitude-7.8 quake rattled the Kangra Valley in Punjab, India, killing 20,000 people. But sandwiched between these two regions is the picturesque mountain town of Chamba, and it sustained no damage in these earthquakes. As such, the researchers wanted to know whether the region also faces a large earthquake risk.The team analyzed most ancient structures in the region. Among the most notable are the stone Lakshmi Narayan temples and the wooden Bharmour Chitrari temples, which were built around the year 680. Of course, it can be difficult to determine what causes pillars to tilt and floors to deform. But it turns out that the waves rippling out from an earthquake travel in a clear orientation that can make earthquake damage easy to identify, the researchers said. Now that the region’s earthquake risk has been identified, it’s up to engineers to build structures that are safe enough to withstand such an event, Joshi added.