SOUTH Asia’s monsoons dump so much rain on the Himalayas that the water’s sheer weight seems to suppress seismic activity along the mountain range.
This is one of two theories put forward by Laurent Bollinger of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to explain why earthquakes of magnitude 4 or greater in Nepal (based on a local scale) were 63 per cent less frequent during the monsoons than during winter. Bollinger and his colleagues discovered this by looking at records of quakes that shook Nepal between 1995 and 2005. The likelihood of this variation occurring by chance is less than…
