A strong earthquake killed at least 53 people in Tibet on Tuesday and left many others trapped. Dozens of aftershocks shook the western region of China and Nepal, across the border.
The official Xinhua news agency said another 62 people were injured, citing the regional disaster relief headquarters.
About 1,500 firefighters and rescue workers were deployed to search for people in the rubble, the Ministry of Emergency Management said.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 7.1-magnitude quake was centered in the Tibet region, at a depth of about 10 kilometers. China recorded a magnitude of 6.8.
The epicenter was about 75 kilometers northeast of Mount Everest, which straddles the border. The area is seismically active, where the Indian and Eurasian plates collide and cause uplifts in the Himalayan mountains strong enough to change the height of some of the world’s highest peaks.
The average altitude in the area around the epicenter is around 4,200 meters, the China Earthquake Networks Center said in a social media post.
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said there were a handful of communities within a five-kilometer radius of the epicenter, which was 380 kilometers from Tibet’s capital Lhasa and about 23 kilometers from the second largest city in the region, Xigaze.
In Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, the earthquake pushed residents out of their homes after being awakened by the tremor. No information was immediately available on mountainous and remote areas closer to the epicenter across the border.
There have been 10 earthquakes of at least magnitude 6 in the area where Tuesday’s quake struck in the past century, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
