(ET)
Researchers at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) have found a major fault line along the coast in the Krishna-Godavari basin in Andhra Pradesh and predicted that it could trigger earthquakes and tsunamis in the future. The researchers said the fault was once active and it may become active again. This poses a major earthquake threat to the north coastal region of the state, particularly the port city of Visakhapatnam. They have described the long fracture line in the offshore of the KG basin as a “major coastal hazard in north Andhra Pradesh”.
The UoH team took up the research in collaboration with the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) and the Oil & Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC). They uncovered the presence of once repetitively active fracture or fault line to the east of north AP. The fracture line has a maximum activity focussed in the vicinity of offshore Visakhapatnam. They said the fracture line may possibly become active again in future and turn out to be a major coastal hazardous event associated with seismicity and tsunami in and around Visakhapatnam region.
According to the researchers, in the last 200 million years, two super-continents called Gondwana and Laurasia fragmented into a number of continental blocks, and then wandered to current positions on the surface of the Earth. In the process, the edges of continents are associated with one of the two categories of continental margins: passive and active margins.
