(Updated assessment, details)
by Joe Cash and Gopal Sharma
A 6.8 magnitude earthquake occurred Tuesday morning in southern Tibet, in the northern foothills of the Himalayas, killing at least 95 people according to a provisional report provided by the official Chinese press.
Tremors were also felt in Nepal, India and Bhutan.
According to the Chinese Seismology Center, the epicenter of the earthquake which occurred at 9:05 a.m. (01:05 GMT) was located at a depth of ten kilometers in Tingri, in the Shigatse region, which has 800,000 inhabitants and serves as a detention camp. base for Everest climbers.
The American Geological Survey measured a magnitude of 7.1.
The earthquake was felt across the region, also shaken by a series of aftershocks with magnitudes up to 4.4.
At least 95 dead and 130 injured were recorded in Tibet, official Chinese television reported six hours after the earthquake. No deaths have yet been announced in neighboring countries.
Tremors extended as far as Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, some 400 kilometers away, where residents fled their homes.
“We have mobilized police, security forces and local authorities to gather information,” Dizan Bhattarai, spokesperson for Nepal’s National Disaster Management Agency (NDRRMA), told Reuters.
Many sparsely populated villages are difficult to access and can only be reached on foot.
Chinese authorities have announced the dispatch of 1,500 firefighters and rescue workers and tents, blankets and folding beds to the disaster zone.
According to the Xinhua news agency, some 7,000 residents live in an area of around twenty kilometers around the epicenter of the earthquake where a thousand homes were damaged.
The Lhasa plate, located in the south of the Tibetan plateau, is an active seismic zone which has experienced around twenty earthquakes since 1950, the most powerful of which, of magnitude 6.9, occurred in 2017 in Mainling.
Further south, in 2015, a 7.8 magnitude tremor struck near Kathmandu, killing around 9,000 people.
Nearly 70,000 people were killed by a powerful earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, east of Tibet, in 2008.
(Joe Cash, with Gopal Sharma and Jatindra Dash; French version Jean Terzian and Jean-Stéphane Brosse, edited by Blandine Hénault)
