Geophysical Research Letters, 45, 26522658. The epicenter of the earthquake was in Nepal six miles south of Mt. GeoPlanet: Earth and Planetary Sciences. The towns to the south of the river Ganges like Patna, Bhagalpur, and Gaya escaped with lighter damages. First published on Sat 25 Apr 2015 16.53 EDT. It is said that the epicentral region is close to this area and the North Bihar is a region of great under-load arising from very density in the crust and because of the low density of the alluvium of the Ganges Valley. Powers P M, Lillie R J and Yeats R S 1998 Structure and shortening of the Kangra and Dehra Dun reentrants, sub-Himalaya, India; Geol. PubMedGoogle Scholar. Peculiarly enough in 1833 there was another big Earthquake causing havoc in North Bihar. The clock in the tower of the Secretariat stopped at 2.16 p.m. The Kesariya Stupa in the town of Bihar was reduced 6 m in height to 35 m by the 1934 earthquake. Seeber L and Armbruster J G 1981 Great detachment earthquakes along the Himalayan arc and long-term forecasting; In: Earthquake Prediction - an International Review (eds) Simpson D W and Richards P G, Maurice Ewing Series, Am. http://bit.ly/2bO3W3i. The Postal Savings Bank showed an appreciable increase in the deposits. Devastatingdisasters.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Almost half of the bridges in the valley would be impassible, and 10 percent of all paved roads would have moderate damage, such as deep cracks or subsidence. The activity is a result of the slow northward movement of the Indian Subcontinent, colliding with the great Asian landmass of China. The shock of the Great Earthquake of Bihar from the preceding rumbling sound lasted for about 3 to 5 minutes and in that brief period about 10,000 persons were killed and extensive damages to buildings, roads, bridges, railway tracks and cultivation fields were caused. This mountainous region is one of the most seismically active continental areas on earth. News from the country was available only next morning, showing that Patna, Monghyr and Jamalpur had suffered severely. The 7.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal and neighbouring Indian states on Saturday, leaving a massive trail of death and devastation, jolted memories of the catastrophic 1934 tragedy, which had claimed several thousands of human lives on both sides of the Himalayas. Nature Geoscience, 6, 7176. It shook an area half a million square miles in extent in Nepal and Tibet. Journal of Nepal Geological Society, 5, 2244. Geophysical Research Letters. Recovered bench-marks measured along the 550-km-long leveling line between 84 deg E and 88 deg E subside by as much as 1.1m near points that have subsided by less than 0.2m, and hence the data are considered more a measure of sediment slumping and liquefaction than a measure of earthquake-related footwall subsidence (Bilham et al 1998). Journal of Asian Earth Sciences. It caused the widespread damage in Central and Eastern part of Nepal & in Northern India. Presently, he works as a freelance/ independent history researcher, writer and works at www.awazthevoice.in, On January, 15th, 1934, at about 2.13 p.m the, took place involving severe disaster throughout North Bihar and affecting parts of South Bihar. The new specifications promulgated by the Government laying stress on the use of horizontal reinforced concrete of R.B. In H. J. Couchman (Ed. Journal of Geophysical Research, 82, 29452969. Overcoming the odds How Babur Arafat brought Pride to India. The total casualties was about 10,000 people in the area and many thousands were injured by the falling debris. A catalog of felt intensity data for 589 earthquakes in India, 16362008. Mem. The loss to livestock was enormous. Mr. Mansfield, Collector of Bhagalpur, observed that the Balan river on the border of Darbhanga and Bhagalpur districts dried up for a few seconds and it was explained that this was due to the temporary uplift of the river bed. Nature In this year 1934-35 the local Government had instituted an enquiry into the indebtedness of the cultivators to ascertain if the situation had worsened. In Patna, many buildings in the bazaar were destroyed and damage was particularly severe along the river. 13-National Earthquake Safety Day, 2011, Nepal. This 8.0 magnitude earthquake occurred on 15 January 1934 at around 2:13pm IST (08:43 UTC) and caused widespread damage in northern Bihar and in Nepal. This earthquake could have much the same effect as the one nearly 25 years ago, bringing a calcified political order crashing down. Journal of Geophysical Research Solid Earth, 119(9), 71237163. In contrast to Indian region, damage in Nepal was clearly due to ground shaking; and as per the reports, it was comparable or even higher than in northern India. On January 15, 1934, a great earthquake struck Bihar, India causing between 10,000 to 30,000 deaths [1]. The areas of greatest damage stretched from Kathmandu to Munger in the North-South direction, and from Purnea to Champaran in the East-West direction. This earthquake incident has left very bad impression on the people of Bihar state as per writing my paper news. Its rupture length was estimated to be 1,200 miles. 1st English edition. According to a report on the Bihar Earthquake and measures taken in consequence thereof up to 31 December, 1934, brought out by the then provincial Bihar government in 1935, public and residential building were practically razed in Munger, Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur districts. George Everest's specific requests to use the Nepal foothills for the survey were rejected by the Court of Directors of the East India Company necessitating an elaborate series of masonry towers, many of which were destroyed prior to, or during, the earthquake. In Bhagalpur district many buildings collapsed. Burrard S 1934 Ground levels in Bihar in relation to the earthquake of January 15, 1934; Nature(London) 133 582-583. Bettinelli P, Avouac J-P, Flouzat M, Jouanne F, Bollinger L, Willis P and Chitrakar G R 2006 Plate motion of India and interseismic strain in the Nepal Himalaya from GPS and DORIS measurements; J. Geod. Disasters An appraisal of damage by Pandey and Molnar (1988) based on a translation of a contemporary damage published in Nepali by Major Brahma Sumsher J. ", "Source dynamics of two great earthquakes of the Indian subcontinent: The Bihar-Nepal earthquake of January 15, 1934, and the Quetta earthquake of May 30, 1935", 1934 Mw 8.1 Bihar/Nepal earthquake 15 January 1934, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1934_NepalIndia_earthquake&oldid=1133023739, All Wikipedia articles written in Indian English, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 11 January 2023, at 22:58. These effects are discussed in detail by Hough and Bilham (2008). Journal of Earth System Science. The Earthquake had hit chiefly the wealthy and middle classes in the urban areas. In Purnea the cast iron piles of a bridge between the civil lines and the railway station were broken. Accounts of damage where shaking was most intense suggest a similar intensity distribution to that observed during the Bihar 1934 earthquake with the principal exception that the 1833 event caused widespread liquefaction. done in Zurich after a mining disaster in 1906 and an earthquake in Messina, Italy in 1908 (Stierlin, 1909 and 1911). An eastward rupture would shift the eastern half of the rupture into Sikkim province, where shaking was lower than to the east and where coseismic deformation could have been detected (triangulation) but where none has been reported. Half of all electric lines would be knocked out. For this reason the earthquake appears on many maps in the the wrong location (almost 200 km too far south).The reason for this was partly due to its misleading early instrumental location, partly due to the sedimentary basin amplification of seismic waves south of the epicenter, which resulted in massive damage near the Ganges, and partly due to the exclusion of foreigners from Nepal (1815 to 1950) which lead to much of the damage in Nepal in not being recognized. Hayes et al. Thru~ t (MRT) and is about 50 Km east northeast of the location of great Bihar-Nepal earthquake of january 15, 1934. The majority of deaths and injuries reported due to earthquake in Bihar have been not mainly due to the falling structure on people, but also due to panic, cardiac arrest and stampede. Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth, 115. Top 5 Most Violent States to Live in The US, The US Armys 5 Disastrous Wartime Decisions, 6 of the Most Powerful Revolutions in History, 6 Times We Have Avoided All Out Nuclear War, Devastating Political Assassinations That Changed History, The Story Behind The U2 Spy Plane And All Its Consequences May, 1, 1960, Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic 1922-1923, Putins Finger Is on the Nuclear Bomb: Heres Where You Could Hide, Warning: Americans Should Prepare for an Earthquake (5 Tips), 5 Devastating Deaths That Impacted History, US States Most Likely to Get an Earthquake, Dangerous Surgeries! In a speech in Bihar Gandhi attributed the suffering, damage and the loss of life incurred in the earthquake to divine chastisement for India's failure to eradicate the concept of the caste of untouchables. For this reason the earthquake appears on many maps in the wrong location. Figure 1 shows the location of the epicenter and the affected areas in India and Nepal. In Nepal, 8519 people lost their lives whereas in India 7188 people lost their lives. Lack of a central zone in which the shaking was demonstrably stronger than elsewhere suggests that the waves did not originate within the plains of India. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL074270. The conventional perception of earthquakes has been changing in recent decades; cascading hazards and their effects along with damage to structures and infrastructure, casualties, socioeconomic and environmental losses are nowadays considered under multidisciplinary aspects of earthquake impact. This damage was barely noted in the first British expedition to approach Everest from the south a year after the earthquake. the locking line of Feldl and Bilham (2006). The High Court and the Government House were damaged severely. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-016-9554-z. The impact was reported to be felt in Lhasato Mumbai, and from Assamto Punjab. Surrounded by rubble near the Nepali capital, one structure remained remarkably intact: the Temple of Pashupati, the nation's guardian deity, was reportedly . Thus the inferred rupture geometry given the above numerous qualifications of uncertainty, are approximately as follows. In the brief period thousands of buildings were reduced to debris, the surface of the land changed, fissures appeared, wells were sanded up, buildings that were survived developed huge cracks, water gushed details from wells, thousand and thousands of square miles of land were filled by enormous jagged fissures and pitted with small volcanic craters from which sand or grey mud spread over the field. Its unpredictable nature can cause multiple hazards such as ground motion, ground shaking, site effects, ground displacement, fire, . 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