A fault discovered
geologists have discovered an active tectonic fault about 60 kilometres (km) north of Kathmandu in Nepal. The new fault runs 23 km south of the Main Central Thrust (mct), which demarcates the Greater Himalayan ranges in the north from the Lesser Himalayan mountains in the south.
Nepal is sandwiched between the Eurasian and the Indian tectonic plates and the central Nepalese Himalaya is gaining at least one centimetre annually due to these plates pushing against each other. The underthrusting of the Indian tectonic plate has been concentrated along several fault zones within a belt about 100 km wide in the Himalayan kingdom. The northernmost of these fault zones is mct .
The findings by Cameron Wobus, a doctoral student at the us -based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his guide, Arjun Heimsath at Dartmouth College, and others appeared in the April 21 issue of Nature (Vol 434, No 7036).
What intrigued the scientists is an unusual increase in erosion rates in a small stretch along the new fault. An analysis of certain chemicals found in the sediments revealed the erosion rate was 0.8 millimetre per year