Six-year study reveals ancient earthquakes along 150-mile-long fault system in Nepal | Virginia Tech News

A common misconception about research is that it is conducted in climate-controlled laboratories using microscopes, beakers, and Bunsen burners.

While this is true for many fields, obtaining geoscience data can require field work in remote, rugged terrain with potentially extreme weather conditions. These investigations may require flying around the world, hiking for days above 14,000 feet in the Himalayas during all types of weather, and even sacrificing personal hygiene.

“I barely wash my hair,” Elizabeth Curtis, Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth Sciences at Virginia Tech, said. “The water is too cold.”

Curtis was part of a collaborative project with researchers from several American universities and researchers from Nepal, who studied the history of earthquakes along a 150-mile-long fault system in western Nepal. She went twice to Nepal, and her efforts paid off in seismic fashion as she was the lead author of a paper published in Geosphere, a journal of the Geological Society of America, that highlighted the group's work.

This paper culminated a nearly six-year project that also included Sean Bemis, a research scientist in the College of Science's Department of Earth Sciences and the project's lead principal investigator. There were many facets to the project, but primarily he and Curtis collected data to document the timing of prehistoric earthquakes on different parts of the Western Nepal Rift System, and that data revealed at least three previously undocumented major earthquakes that had occurred along the system over the past 10,000 years and perhaps as many as 14 years apart.

The value of this data is twofold. Knowing the probability of earthquakes occurring on this fault system is directly useful for countries like Nepal and India to plan for the impact of future earthquakes. In addition, information about the pattern of past earthquakes in the western Nepal fault system provides a model for the potential for earthquakes in similar tectonic regions around the world.

“We want to take what we've learned about this fault system and integrate it with the broader network of faults in the Himalayas,” Bemis said. “We want to generate the kinds of data about earthquake sources that planners and designers can use to improve the geometry of structures in the area to anticipate potential hazards.”

Digging trenches in search of ancient evidence

Researchers have been deciphering Himalayan tectonics for decades, but before the COVID-19 pandemic, a small group came up with a project idea about the rift system in western Nepal based on evidence from previous studies. The group members decided they wanted to pursue a more comprehensive study. Many of their grant applications were rejected, and they asked Bemis for help largely because of his expertise in paleontology — a field of study that determines the timing and magnitude of prehistoric earthquakes using geological evidence.

“I've never worked in Nepal before, but the Himalayas are an example that all geologists study in school,” Bemis said. “I think I had a fairly good reputation for my remote fieldwork in Alaska and that was probably what prompted them to reach out to me to join the project.”

Bemis eventually obtained a grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the project and invited Curtis to be a part of it. The group also included researchers from the University of Kansas, the University of Houston, and Tribhuvan University in Nepal. The team conducted three years of fieldwork through the fault system.

Fieldwork was carried out in 2019, 2021 and 2022, with Bemis going to Nepal in 2019 and 2021 and Curtis going in 2021 and 2022. They each spent more than a month in Nepal on each trip, with an additional week in 2021 spent in quarantine after arriving in Kathmandu while following Nepal's COVID-19 protocols. Later, they braved altitude sickness, snowy trails, and, once, a severe storm that trapped them in their tents for more than two days.

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