Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Gahalaut, Vineet.
The 25 April 2015 Gorkha, Nepal earthquake of magnitude 7.8 devastated parts of Nepal and northern India with a death toll of more than 8000. Here, several aftershocks of moderate size were recorded, including one of M7.2 on 12 May 2015 on the eastern periphery of the main rupture.
The response from the geosciences community working on Himalaya in general, and the 2015 Nepal earthquakes in specific, was overwhelming, and after a rigorous review process, thirteen papers were selected and published in Part-1. We are still left with a few good papers which are being brought out as Part–2 of the special issue. Here, we describe how in the opening article Jean-Louis Mugnier and colleagues attempt to provide a structural geological perspective of the 25 April 2015 Gorkha earthquake and highlight the role of segmentation in generating the Himalayan mega-thrusts. They could infer segmentation by stable barriers in the HT that define barrier-type earthquake families. In yet another interesting piece of work, Pandey and colleagues map the crustal structure across the earthquake volume using Receiver function approach and infer a 5-km thick low velocity layer that connects to the MHT ramp. They are also able to correlate the rupture termination with the highest point of coseismic uplift. The last paper by Shen et al. highlights the usefulness of INSAR technique in mapping the coseismic slip distribution applied to the 25 April 2015 Gorkha earthquake. Finally, they infer low stress drop and corner frequency which coupled with hybrid modeling explain the low level of slip heterogeneity and frequency of ground motion.