Pakistan is prone to powerful earthquakes owing to their birth to the juncture of three colliding tectonic plates: Indian, Eurasian and Arabian. The Indian and Eurasian plates grind past each other along the Chaman Fault, triggering destructive temblors.
The deadly earthquakes of 2005 and 2013 struck along one of the most hazardous yet poorly studied tectonic plate boundaries in the world.
The earthquakes were likely centred on a southern strand of the Chaman Fault. In 1935, an earthquake on the northern Chaman Fault killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed the town of Quetta. It was one of the deadliest quakes ever in Southeast Asia.
Earthquakes along the Chaman Fault are more frequent in the north than in the south.
Similar to California's San Andreas Fault or Turkey's East Anatolian Fault, in some spots, the massive plate boundary is not a single fracture. In southern Pakistan, the Chaman Fault splits into more than one strand, weaving a braid of many smaller faults. The differences between north and south influence the number of earthquakes. In the past 40 years, only one quake bigger than magnitude 6.0 has jiggled southern Pakistan