On November 3, around one o’clock in the morning local time, a powerful earthquake struck the Tashkurgan Gorge area in Afghanistan, registering a magnitude of 6.3. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), its epicenter was located near Khulam in Samangan Province, and the focus lay at a depth of approximately 17 miles.
The tremors were felt across the provinces of Balkh, Samangan, Sar-e Pol, Kunduz, Jawzjan, Badakhshan, Faryab, as well as in the country’s capital, Kabul.
The National Disaster Management Authority reported that the earthquake resulted in 24 fatalities, and more than 800 people were injured, with 25 of them in critical condition. However, due to the lack of internet access in the remote affected areas, it is extremely difficult to determine the exact number of casualties.
The seismic event caused widespread power outages, as transmission lines from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — the country’s main energy suppliers were damaged.
Despite Afghanistan being located in a seismically active zone, many buildings in the region are not designed to withstand earthquakes, which resulted in extensive destruction from this strong tremor. In just one village in the Shahr-i-Bozorg district of Badakhshan Province, approximately 800 homes were damaged or completely destroyed.
In the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the famous Blue Mosque — one of Afghanistan’s most important Islamic shrines and a pilgrimage center associated with Imam Ali — sustained damage.
Following the nighttime earthquake, the main mountain highway through Tashkurgan Gorge, connecting the northern provinces to the capital, was blocked by a landslide. Rescue teams cleared the road, but the risk of falling rocks and additional landslides remains.
It is important to understand that earthquakes occurring today are incomparable in their danger to those recorded earlier in the history of civilization. Whereas strong seismic events used to be rare, their frequency now shows a steady exponential increase. For more than six months, the planet has been registering a consistent rise in earthquakes of magnitude six and higher. You can easily verify this yourself by installing any seismic monitoring application. All of this points to increasing stress within the Earth’s crust.
There is still an opportunity to relieve this pressure, but it will only be possible until earthquakes of magnitude seven and above start occurring regularly.
What must be done right now to prevent reaching a point of no return was explained by Dr. Egon Cholakian in his scientific address “Catastrophic Earthquakes Are Inevitable. Scientists’ Warning.”