The tremor have been felt by millions in northern Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan
News Desk
Islamabad: A moderate earthquake jolted the High Asia region on Friday (February 12) evening causing panic among millions of people in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China’s western Xinjiang province.
The epicentre of the relatively deep earthquake was Murghab, Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous province of Tajikistan, media and seismic research centres in Europe and America reported.
It was 86km below the surface that shacked cities in many countries as far as over 1,000km including Islamabad, Kashmir, and New Delhi. People were panicked who came out of their houses at 10pm, the VolcanoDiscovery centre reported.
People in Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir, Peshawar, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Hafizabad, Lahore, were shaken.
Many locations reported objects falling from shelves, beds shaking for as much as 15 seconds, lamps and fans swaying, creaking walls, agitated animals, birds flying from trees or chirping, sounds like thunder, and even people shouting “earthquake”.
People ran outdoors as the quake was also felt in countries that have poor connectivity to report, with a handful of reports of shaking from Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The jolts were also felt in Dushanbe and Khujand in Tajikistan, Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city 280km from the epicenter.
According to the US Geospatial (USGS) the quake was 5.9 magnitude a bit weaker than the originally reported magnitude 6 at 10.01pm local time.
The German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) reported the epicentre off 29km in Murghab (population 10,800) in the Badakhshan National Park, Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) in southeastern Tajikistan. The area is largely unpopulated terrain, part of the mighty Pamir Mountains in the High Asia region.
However, a report from the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) which listed the quake at magnitude 6.1.
On December 7, 2015, a quack of the 7.2 magnitudes hit Gorno-Badakhshan killing at least two people trapped under the rock falls, and injuring more than 14 and damaging 1,327 houses.