Rare Caterpillar-like Horizontal Earthquake Discovered

By Crystal Gammon

Imagine that, as you sit at your desk or in your living room reading this story, your entire city suddenly snaps a foot to the south. That's what happened to the city of Kohat, Pakistan, in 1992. A magnitude-6.0 earthquake moved a 30-square-mile (80-square-kilometer) swath of land one foot (30 centimeters) horizontally in a split second, leveling buildings and killing more than 200 people.

The area hadn't experienced many temblors before, making the earthquake an unusual occurrence. Now, 20 years later, geologists have used satellite and seismic data to track down the cause of that rare quake — an equally rare type of fault.

The pattern we saw was absolutely a dead ringer for a horizontal fault, said Roger Bilham, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But here's the problem: How do you get a horizontal earthquake?

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory



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