(My thoughts on the Mega Earthquake in Myanmar 0n 28 March 2025.)
The Lord our God has punished Myanmar with a
Mega-Earthquake the world had never seen on that scale before. Myanmar also is one
of the most geologically "active" areas in the world because it sits
on top of the convergence of four of these tectonic plates - the Eurasian
plate, the Indian plate, the Sunda plate and the Burma microplate.
The Himalayas were formed by the Indian plate
colliding with the Eurasian plate, and the 2004 Tsunami as a result of the
Indian plate moving beneath the Burma microplate. Dr Rebecca Bell, a reader in
tectonics at Imperial College London, said that to accommodate all this motion,
faults - cracks in the rock - form which allow tectonic plates to
"slither" sideways.
There is a major fault called the Sagaing fault , which cuts right through Myanmar north to south and is more than 1,200km (746 miles) long. Early data suggests that the movement that caused Friday's 7.7-magnitude earthquake was a "strike-slip" - where two blocks move horizontally along each other. This aligns with the movement typical of the Sagaing fault. As the plates move past each other, they can become stuck, building friction until it is suddenly released and the earth shifts, causing an earthquake.