The study suggests that a huge earthquake that occurred 2,500 years ago changed the course of the Ganges River

A new study suggests that a huge earthquake that struck South Asia 2,500 years ago suddenly changed the course of the Ganges River.

The earthquake was not previously known to science, but researchers spotted evidence of its enormous power buried in the landscape near Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The team revealed its findings in a study published on Monday (June 17) in the journal Nature Communications. The quake likely had a magnitude of 7.5 or 8 and was so powerful that it redirected the main riverbed of the Ganges — even though the displaced portion of the river is more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) away from the epicenter.

Rapid changes in the course of a river are called reversals. Researchers have previously documented rifting caused by seismic activity, but “I don't think we've seen such a large rupture anywhere before,” says study co-author Michael Stickler, a geophysicist and research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia. . The New York Climate School said in a statement.

The Ganges is one of the largest rivers in the world, flowing about 1,600 miles (2,500 km). It begins in the Himalayas, on the border between India and China, and then flows east through India into Bangladesh, where it merges with other major rivers, including the Brahmaputra and Meghna. The combined waterways flow to form the largest river delta on Earth and empty into the Bay of Bengal.

Related: Why Do Earthquakes Occur Far From Plate Boundaries?

Like other rivers that flow through large deltas, the Ganges can change its course — without the help of an earthquake — by carrying sediment that gradually accumulates on the river bed. Eventually, enough sediment accumulates in one place to grow taller than the surrounding landscape, at which point the river spills over and carves a new path for itself.

While this process occurs over several years or decades, the earthquake likely changes the course of the river more or less instantaneously, Stickler said.

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“It has not been previously confirmed that earthquakes can trigger fluctuations in a delta, especially for a massive river like the Ganges,” study author Liz Chamberlain, a geoscientist and assistant professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said in the statement.

The Ganges Delta (pictured from satellite) is the largest river delta in the world. The dark part of the delta is the Sundarbans, a vast wildlife reserve and mangrove swamp. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/UCSD/JSC)

The statement said that satellite images gave scientists the first evidence that the Ganges River had changed its course violently in the past. Chamberlain and her colleagues spotted what looked like an ancient river channel running parallel to the Ganges about 62 miles (100 kilometers) south of Dhaka. The researchers then explored the area to collect more evidence and found bands of sand cutting through the muddy ground in several locations. They identified these bands as quakes—vertical layers of sand that “erupt” when an earthquake shakes watery soil—and concluded that they formed in a single event.

Chemical analyzes of the sand and clay revealed that the event, which scientists concluded must have been a huge earthquake, occurred 2,500 years ago.

According to the study, there could have been two separate mechanisms that caused the earthquake. The first is a seismically active area around the Shillong Massif in northeastern India, where the Indian tectonic plates collide with the Eurasian plate. The second is the subduction of the Indian Ocean crust under Bangladesh, Myanmar and northeastern India. Both occurred more than 110 miles from where researchers found the quakes, suggesting that the Ganges earthquake had a magnitude of at least 7.5 to 8, according to the study.

A 2016 study led by Stickler showed that both the Shillong Massif and the Indo-Burman subduction zone could generate earthquakes of the same magnitude again. The study found that such an earthquake could affect about 140 million people.

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