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The devastating death toll forecast for Himalayan quakes

Hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk as a result of population boom in seismic zone.
A nepalese man can be seen through a doorway of a collapsed house in Bhaktapur. Broken timber beams are in foreground

An earthquake centred in Nepal in 2015 killed about 10,000 people, but the toll could be much higher if the region experienced a repeat of powerful quakes that hit the Himalayas centuries ago. Credit: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty

An earthquake similar to one that struck the Himalayas five centuries ago could kill almost 600,000 people in the region today, most of them in India.

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Nature 561, 436 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06702-9

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