Why is the Himalaya earthquake prone ?

Millions of people are at risk from massive earthquakes in

the Himalayas, say geologists in the United States and India. Great earthquakes, they propose, are the
only release for stress that has been building in the Earth's crust along the southern edge of the Himalayas
for decades. Large earthquakes have struck this region every few decades since the early nineteenth
century. Since 1950, when the biggest earthquake within a single continent in recorded history shook
Assam, the fault lines have been silent. But the pressure has been mounting, say Roger Bilham of the
University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues.
Some parts of the Himalayan region have been seismically inactive for far longer, perhaps even
for several centuries. If earthquakes happen in these places, they could therefore be catastrophic.
Extrapolating from the human cost of earlier earthquakes in the light of today's population numbers,
Bilham's team estimates that 200,000 people could be killed in a single event. But if the earthquake
happened near one of the huge cities on the Ganges Plain, fatalities could be ten times greater, they
speculate.
This region, which stretches 300 km to the south and southeast of the Himalayas, is home to over
40 million people, mainly in the capital cities of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan. A
disaster here would dwarf the one that occurred last January, when 19,000 people were killed by an
earthquake in Bhuj, northwest India. The Bhuj event highlighted the ineffectiveness of building codes that
are supposed to lessen the seismic hazard. Other Indian cities would probably be no better equipped to
withstand a major quake.
The region south of the Himalayas is earthquake-prone because the Indian continent is colliding
with the Eurasian tectonic plate to the north. This process began at least 50 million years ago, creating the
mountain range and the Tibetan plateau at the collision zone.Where the two plates converge, the Indian
one plunges below the Eurasian. Pressure builds up as the plates push together, until the Indian plate
lurches suddenly downwards, sending a great earthquake reverberating across hundreds of kilometres.