Kashmir is well known to be a high-risk area for earthquakes and Saturday's massive temblor was all the more devastating because it's focus was at a shallow depth, experts said.
"Generally speaking, shallow earthquakes tend to cause greater damage than deep earthquakes," Yasuo Sekita, a seismic specialist at the Japan Meteorological Agency, said.
Saturday's quake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, was centered on the Kashmir region with a focus some 10km beneath the Earth's surface, according to the US Geological Survey and other seismic institutes.
The quake caused damage to widespread areas because of its shallow depth, agreed Issei Ohara, a seismologist at Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention.
Kashmir is prone to large earthquakes because it lies at the collision point of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, which created the Himalayas 50 million years ago.
"The earthquake occurred where two plates clash," Katsumasa Abe, professor at the Tokyo University Earthquake Research Institute, said.
"It is one of the most earthquake-prone places in the world," he told Japan's public broadcaster NHK.
Earthquakes with both shallow and deep focuses occur in the Kashmir region, Ohara's colleague, Yoshimitsu Okada, was also quoted as saying in the Japanese daily Mainichi.
Japan, sitting on an area where three tectonic plates converge, endures 25 percent of the world's major earthquakes and has built its infrastructure accordingly, with Tokyo's high-rises designed to withstand powerful tremors.
Not so in Kashmir where many buildings are four or five stories in height, constructed of soft clay.
Monitoring the tremendous stresses below the surface, experts in recent years have noted an increase in the seismic activity of the plates under Kashmir.
Such research has led to calls for housing construction methods that have remained virtually unchanged for generations to be upgraded in the region to make them more resilient to earthquakes.
Much of Kashmir, which is shared and disputed by India and Pakistan, is very poor. A separatist insurgency in the Indian-held zone has raged since 1989 and has left more than 44,000 people dead.
Seismologists have long considered the region to be a danger area like other parts of India such as Gujarat in the west where more than 25,000 people lost their lives in 2001 after a 6.7-magnitude quake.
Geographical statistics show that almost 54 percent of India's land is vulnerable to earthquakes. Kashmir lies close to the fault line of the tectonic plates where the most severe quakes are to be expected.
The region, along with other areas in the western and central Himalayas, falls into India's most severe Zone V category of earthquake risk, one more than the notorious Kutch region in Gujarat.
A number of aftershocks have rattled Kashmir and beyond since Saturday's initial, massive quake.
RSS