Extraordinary Earthquake

Earth has 7 plates in lithosphere. There are Eurasia plate, Indo-Australia plate, Arctic
plate, Pacific plate, North American plate, South American plate, African plate. The fastest
moving plate is Pacific plate, it is 52-69 mm/year, and the slowest is Eurasia plate it is 21
mm/year. There are 3 typed of movements of plate boundaries, convergent, divergent, and
transform boundaries.
The Indo-Australian Plate was one of the major tectonic plate that included the continent
of Australia and surrounding ocean, and extended northwest to include the Indian
subcontinent and adjacent waters.The area is 60 million km2.
One of the spectacular phenomenon is occur at 11 April 2012. Unlike most earthquakes
that shake along a single fault, this one ruptured along four faults, one of which slipped as much
as 2030 metres. The US geological survey said the main shock was magnitude 8.6, which is
extraordinarily high for a strike-slip fault. Two hours after the main shock was felt, the area was
hit by a magnitude-8.2 aftershock, probably caused by slippage along the same 125-mile fault.
The huge release of energy redistributed stress to other weak spots in the crust, making them
more likely to cause future earthquakes.Seismologists have suspected since the 1980s that the
Indo-Australian plate may be breaking up. According to prevailing theories of plate tectonics, the
Indo-Australian plate began to deform internally about 10 million years ago. As the plate moved
northwards, the region near India crunched against the Eurasian plate, thrusting the Himalayas
up and slowing India down.
Delescluse and his team inferred the presence of these seismic stresses by modelling
stress changes from shortly before the 2012 earthquakes. They found that two earlier earthquakes
along the eastern plate boundary the magnitude-9.1 tremor in 2004 that unleashed a massive
tsunami across the Indian Ocean, and another quake in 2005 probably triggered the 2012
event by adding to pent-up stresses in the plates middle region.
Gregory Beroza, a seismologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, says that
the model is a likely explanation. The 2004 and 2005 earthquakes by themselves would not
have caused this other earthquake. There had to be other stresses, he says.
The eastern part (Australia) is moving northward at the rate of 5.6 cm per year while the
western part (India) is moving only at the rate of 3.7 cm per year due to the impediment of the

Himalayas. This differential movement has resulted in the compression of the former plate near
its center at Sumatra and the division into the Indian and Australian Plates.

Appendix

Reference

http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2012/09/30/earth-cracking-indian-ocean-april-2012-east-

indian-ocean-quake-triggers-many-distant-quakes/
http://www.nature.com/news/unusual-indian-ocean-earthquakes-hint-at-tectonic-breakup-

1.11487
https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektonika_lempeng
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Australian_Plate