GWADAR – Nearly 40 geologists from China and Pakistan have teamed up tosurvey the Makran Trench in Balochistan over the possibility of a massiveearthquake affecting the strategic Gwadar port, a media report said onSaturday. The trench is the meeting point for two tectonic plates and isclose to the Pakistani deep-sea port of Gwadar which China has acquired ona 40-year lease.
Gwadar forms part of the important link for the over $50 billion ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) connecting to China’s Xinjiang provincethrough the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). “It has been more than 70years since the last big earthquake shook the Makran Trench off the southcoast of Pakistan but if and when the next catastrophic one happens, itcould disturb more than the landscape,” the Hong-Kong based South ChinaMorning Post reported.
Any potential disaster in the area could undermine trade from China throughAsia to Africa and Europe through Gwadar port, the report said. That is whyscientists from China and Pakistan have teamed up to survey the trench andassess the dangers lurking in the deep, it said.
The trench is a seismically active zone in the Arabian Sea where one plateis inching beneath the other in a “subduction zone”. The last majorearthquake was of 8.1 magnitude in 1945, which triggered a tsunami thatbattered Iran, Pakistan, Oman and India and killed around 4,000 people.
Last year, a 6.3-magnitude quake hit the area. Despite the damage, not muchis known about the zone. Seismologist Yang Hongfeng from Chinese Universityof Hong Kong said scientific expeditions in this part of the ocean werequite rare. “A lot of important scientific questions remain unanswered,”Yang said.
“The results will definitely advance our understanding … [while] providingcritical data to reduce the risk in the region,” he was quoted as saying inthe report. The quest is to get a better understanding of the subductionzone, which scientists say is unusual in part because it has a deposit ofsoft sediment several kilometres thick, Yang said.
To find answers, roughly 40 researchers from the two countries boarded theExperimental 3-vessel for the trench last month, lowering instruments intothe waters to do a “CT scan” of the Earth’s structure.
The expedition was a joint effort by the South China Sea Institute ofOceanology in Guangzhou and the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO)inPakistan. It was funded largely by the Chinese government-funded ChineseAcademy of Sciences, said Asif Inam, NIO director general.
“The information and data being collected during the expedition would makea significant contribution to coastal developers and planners,” Inam toldSouth China Morning Post. The threat of an earthquake near the port is abig concern for both countries.
“There’s a whole lot at stake. The port, if fully developed andoperationalised, can be a critical asset for Pakistan, and there’s nonation that Pakistan would be more comfortable entrusting it to than itsclose friend China,” Michael Kugelman, said a senior associate for SouthAsia at the US-based think tank Wilson Centre.
Kugelman said the destructive impact that an earthquake or tsunami couldhave on the operations of the port should not be overstated, given thatactual operations were still limited. “Still, given issues of proximity andgeneral vulnerability – Pakistan doesn’t cope or respond well to naturaldisasters, given a lack of resources and incapacity – there’s certainlyreason to believe that intense earthquake activity would pose a clear andpresent danger to Gwadar,” he was quoted as saying in the report.