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Plateau ‘pop-up’ in the great 1897 Assam earthquake

Nature volume 410, pages 806–809 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

The great Assam earthquake of 12 June 1897 reduced to rubble all masonry buildings within a region of northeastern India roughly the size of England, and was felt over an area exceeding that of the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake1. Hitherto it was believed that rupture occurred on a north-dipping Himalayan thrust fault propagating south of Bhutan2,3,4,5. But here we show that the northern edge of the Shillong plateau rose violently by at least 11 m during the Assam earthquake, and that this was due to the rupture of a buried reverse fault approximately 110 km in length and dipping steeply away from the Himalaya. The stress drop implied by the rupture geometry and the prodigious fault slip of 18 ± 7 m explains epicentral accelerations observed to exceed 1g vertically and surface velocities exceeding 3 m s-1 (ref. 1). This quantitative observation of active deformation of a ‘pop-up’ structure confirms that faults bounding such structures can penetrate the whole crust. Plateau uplift in the past 2–5 million years has caused the Indian plate to contract locally by 4 ± 2 mm yr-1, reducing seismic risk in Bhutan but increasing the risk in northern Bangladesh.

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Figure 1: Area shaken by the great 1897 Assam earthquake, and location of major Himalayan ruptures in the past 200 years30.
Figure 2: Epicentral region of the Great 1897 Assam earthquake showing geodetic data and inferred rupture plane.
Figure 3: North–south section from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal showing schematic geometry of plateau pop-up.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Natural Environment Research Council. R.B. received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship while at Oxford University.

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  1. CIRES & Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309-0399, Colorado, USA

    Roger Bilham

  2. Earth Sciences, Oxford University, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PR, UK

    Roger Bilham & Philip England

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Correspondence to Roger Bilham.

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Bilham, R., England, P. Plateau ‘pop-up’ in the great 1897 Assam earthquake. Nature 410, 806–809 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35071057

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