Quetta earthquake
“At three minutes past on the morning of the 31st of May 1935, the irresistible processes of geological evolution caught Quetta by the throat- shook her for twenty-five vicious seconds- and left her dead. The terror sped for over seventy miles from Kalat through Mastung and Sariah, leaving in its wake broken hamlets and crushed villages.”
So begins the official report of the awful Quetta earthquake of 1935. Most people who have lived in North India know something of earthquakes; for the country all along the foot of the Himalayas, from the North-West Frontier to Assam, is subject to earth-quake shocks. These earth tremors are rarely serious. There was a bad one, however in 1905, which caused 5000 deaths. But the Quetta earthquake was without doubt the most terrible that India has known in historical times. Quetta itself was destroyed and the destruction of property and loss of life were both on a very large scale.
Now earthquakes are generally associated with volcanic eruptions. Japan is a volcanic region, and earthquakes are common there and often severe. The one in 1923 killed 99,000 people. It was an earthquake that destroyed Messina and other Sicilian towns in 1908 when the volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna were in eruption and in 1883 an earthquake sank a whole island in the Pacific during the awful eruption of Krakatoa. There is no doubt that in these and many other cases the earthquakes were caused by volcanic activity.
But India is not in the volcanic belt and there are no volcanoes in India. So Indian earthquakes cannot be volcanic earthquakes. To what cause then are they due? A phrase in the official report on the Quetta earthquake gives us a clue: “the irresistible processes of geological evolution”. Now the Himalayas are the highest range of mountains in the world and boast of the loftiest mountain Everest nearly 30,000 feet in height. Geologists tell us that it is also one of the youngest mountain ranges, much younger than the Welsh hills for example; and that it is still growing. The mass of the whole range is unthinkably enormous in its weight. Now as this enormous mass slowly lifts, there is sometimes a slight slip- a setting or readjustment. That is enough to send a tremor through all the range and the land below it. It is felt as an earthquake. It was some such slip or jerk in the “process of the geological evolution” of that part of the Himalayas, which probably caused the terrible Quetta earthquake.
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