00:00Now, this was one of China's deadliest earthquakes in years.
00:04Why is this region so susceptible to them?
00:08Hello.
00:09As your report has said, this particular region sits close to a boundary between two tectonic
00:17plates, India and Asia, which are still converging with each other at about 40 millimetres a
00:23year.
00:25That doesn't sound much, but over geological time, that's a rapid rate of motion, and that
00:31has to be accommodated somehow by slip on faults, which riddle the earth's plates.
00:38And it's when those faults are moving quickly that we get the release of energy that we
00:42call an earthquake.
00:44So whilst we can't usefully and precisely predict when any individual fault will move
00:50and produce a disastrous earthquake, we do have a good picture overall of which areas
00:56are prone to earthquakes, and we can make general forecasts which areas are likely to
01:02see earthquakes in the future.
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