Energy from Nepal earthquake made Mount Everest move 1 inch

(Image credit: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

last updated 17 June 2015

The devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal April 25 caused Mount Everest to move 1.18 inches to the southwest.

The tallest mountain in the world has actually been moving to the north at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year, China's National Administration of Surveying, Mapping, and Geoinformation reports, and also rises .1 inch a year due to the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which pushes the ground up.

Near Kathmandu, above the slipping fault, the ground was lifted by about 3 feet, Richard Briggs of the U.S. Geological Survey told Live Science, but further north the ground abruptly dropped. "Movements on this fault will have affected nearby faults, and some of the faults will be promoted closer to failure [causing a quake], and some will be pulled further away from failure," Briggs said. "The trouble we have is the timing part. We don't know where all these faults are in their kind of 'clocks' and how close they were to kind of going anyway."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox