Sri Lankan News

An earthquake of 6.0 struck the Indian Ocean  just 710 miles off Colombo early this morning but there was no danger for the island nation.

Sri Lanka is not located near any of the 12 or 13 main plate boundaries that are prone to earthquakes. Indeed, it was squarely on a plate that extended from Australia to India. In the last decades, however this plate is beginning to rotate on account of accumulation of run off from the Himalayas in the Bay of Bengal and other reasons leading to a fissure between the “Australian” and “Indian” plates.

Some scientists believe that this is leading to a new plate boundary across the Southern Indian Ocean. This boundary is still approximately a 1000 km from the south of Sri Lanka.

However, these shifts have to be more carefully monitored and seismological studies need to be carefully followed. The Geological Survey and Mining Bureau is the goverment agency entrusted with seismological studies and it hosts a seismic station at Pallekelle in the Kandy District which is part of the global network of seismographs.

Experts in this field say that further research is needed to elucidate the consequences of compressions set up in the India plate and the impact of today’s earthquake on the regional hazards and also more precisely estimate the probabilities of the risk of earthquakes closer to Sri Lanka in future.