The major earthquake that shattered the western Indian state of Gujarat last week came as no surprise to seismologists. Over 10,000 people were killed in last week's quake. Last week's disaster was a so-called intraplate earthquake.
Most earthquakes rupture faults where two tectonic plates slide by each other.
On the plates themselves, the crust is usually more stable. But the Indian subcontinent has been torn, stretched, and strained by eons of plate tectonic jostling, and that has created weak spots in the crust. Where that strain finds weak spots, earthquakes can strike, and they often do so completely haphazardly. Since 1965, India had suffered five intraplate earthquakes that have killed as few as 26 and as many as 9748, according to a compilation published last November in Current Science by Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Vinod Gaur of the Center for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore. More intraplate earthquakes will undoubtedly strike India, Bilham says.