Nepal hit by twin earthquakes, tremors felt in Himalayan highlands

Nepal was hit by twin earthquakes during the intervening night between April 27 and April 28. Two earthquakesof magnitudes 4.8 and 5.9 on the Richter Scale were felt overnight. The epicentreof the earthquake was at Bajura's Dahakot, over 800 km northwest of Kathmandu.

"The first earthquake struck at 11:58 pm (local time) measuring 4.9 magnitude while at 1:30 another measuring 5.9 magnitude has been recorded," Rajesh Sharma, an official at the Seismological Center in Surkhet district of Nepal told New Delhi-based news agencyANI.

No casualties have beenreported so far, the police said.

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While the country has been designated as earthquake-sensitive, the twin earthquakes of 7.8 and 8.1 magnitudes that hit the country in April 2015, led to the most disastrous of all destructions in decades. It killed 8,964 people and injured 21,952 more.

Thousands of houses were destroyed across many districts of the country, with entire villages flattened, especially those near the epicenter.

Nepal lies towards the southern limit of the diffuse collisional boundary where the Indian Plate underthrusts the Eurasian Plate, occupying the central sector of the Himalayan arc, nearly one-third of the 2,400 km (1,500 mi) long Himalayas.

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