Hindu Kush earthquake: why Pakistan gets so many quakes

The quake that rattled Peshawar on Sunday night started about 110 km underground, beneath the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan.

A magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck the Hindu Kush at 17:44 GMT on Sunday, 25 October 2026, about 59 km southwest of Ashkasham, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC). People felt it across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. No damage or injuries were reported.

Quick answer: The Hindu Kush sits at the western corner of the collision between India and Asia. Beneath it, a slab of the Indian plate has sunk into the mantle and is slowly tearing off, which makes the region one of the world’s most active zones for quakes 70 to 300 km down. Those quakes are felt hundreds of kilometers away but rarely flatten towns.

For people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Sunday’s jolt was familiar. The same patch of mountains produces moderate quakes several times a year, and roughly every decade or two a magnitude 7.

What happened in the Hindu Kush earthquake on Sunday?

The EMSC first put the quake at magnitude 5.8, then revised it to 5.2, Reuters reported. That early figure is why some reports still mention a 5.8. It was one earthquake, not two.

It hit at 10:44 p.m. Pakistan time. Pakistani media, citing the national seismic monitoring center, gave a magnitude of 5.1 to 5.2 and said tremors were felt in Peshawar, Mardan, Malakand and other districts. Those reports placed the focus deeper, at roughly 180 to 220 km, than the 110 km given by the USGS and EMSC. There were no reports of casualties or damage on either side of the border.

The region was not the only one shaking that weekend:

• 22 Oct 2026: A magnitude 7.0 quake struck northern Tibet, 191 km east-northeast of Nagqu (USGS).
• 24 Oct 2026: A magnitude 6.9 quake struck at sea off northern Vanuatu in the Pacific (USGS and EMSC).
• 25 Oct 2026, 11:25 GMT: A magnitude 5.9 quake hit the same part of Tibet. Read our report on the Tibet earthquake in Baqen County.
• 25 Oct 2026, 17:44 GMT: The magnitude 5.2 Hindu Kush quake, felt in Peshawar.

Source: USGS and EMSC earthquake catalogs.

A collision that has not stopped

India is still moving north into Asia. The USGS puts the speed at about 37 mm (1.5 inches) a year near the Hindu Kush; a 2021 study in Nature Communications uses a figure of about 34 mm. That push raised the Himalaya, the Karakoram, the Pamir and the Hindu Kush, and it keeps loading the faults beneath them with stress.

The Hindu Kush sits at the western end of that front, where the head-on push turns into sideways sliding. The result is a dense web of faults, the BBC explained after a major quake there in 2015. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) lists several large ones in the north alone, including the Chitral-Hunza fault, which runs through Chitral, Dir, Ghizer and Hunza.

Moderate quakes are routine. A Reuters chronology published by Dawn in September 2025 listed at least a dozen quakes of magnitude 5 or more in the Hindu Kush and along the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border between January 2023 and August 2025. Big ones are rarer but regular: the USGS counts seven quakes of magnitude 7 or more within 250 km of the 2015 epicenter in the hundred years before it.

The slab under the mountains

What makes the Hindu Kush unusual is depth.

Large quakes deeper than 100 km normally happen where old ocean floor dives under another plate, as around the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. Ocean floor is cold and heavy, so it sinks and keeps breaking as it goes. The Hindu Kush is far from any ocean trench, yet it produces quakes at those depths almost constantly. Seismologists call them intermediate-depth earthquakes: quakes that start between 70 and 300 km down, by the USGS definition.

The explanation comes from seismologists who have set up temporary networks of instruments in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Their picture, set out most fully by a team led by Sofia-Katerina Kufner at Germany’s GFZ geosciences center in Nature Communications in 2021, is of a slab of the Indian plate that has been pushed down beneath the Hindu Kush and now hangs almost vertically in the mantle. Its weight pulls on the part still attached near the surface. The slab is thinning where it is being stretched, like toffee pulled from both ends, and the quakes cluster at that narrowing neck.

The GFZ team describes this as slab break-off in progress. Break-off is something geologists normally reconstruct from rocks millions of years after it happened. In the Hindu Kush, the authors write, it is ongoing, and the tear appears to be spreading sideways along the slab. Sunday’s quake, at about 110 km, sat in the upper part of this zone; the 2015 and 2023 quakes were around 190 to 210 km down.

Not everyone reads the evidence the same way. The 2021 paper itself notes that earlier studies interpreted the same body in the mantle as thickened, dense lithosphere sinking in drops, rather than a detaching piece of India. Both camps agree on the practical point: something heavy is sinking beneath the Hindu Kush, and it breaks as it goes.

Why Lahore and Delhi feel a quake in Badakhshan

Depth works in two directions.

Waves from a quake 100 to 200 km down lose less energy than waves that grind through the cracked upper crust, the EMSC explains, so they carry a long way. The magnitude 7.5 Hindu Kush quake of 26 October 2015, about 210 km deep, was felt across Pakistan, India and Tajikistan, with reports from more than 2,300 km away. The magnitude 6.5 quake of 21 March 2023, near Jurm in Badakhshan and about 190 km deep, was felt from Islamabad and Lahore to Delhi; the EMSC estimated that about 285 million people felt it.

The same depth softens the blow above. By the time the waves reach the surface they are spread over a wide area, so intermediate-depth quakes usually cause less damage than shallow quakes of the same size, according to the USGS. The 2023 quake killed 21 people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, AP reported, some of them when walls collapsed.

Shallow quakes are a different story.

Key figure: The Kunar earthquake of 31 August 2025 was only magnitude 6.0, but it started about 8 km down. Afghan authorities put the death toll above 2,200, more than five times the toll of the far stronger and far deeper 2015 quake.

Which earthquakes in the region were the deadliest?

Date	Location	Magnitude	Depth (km)	Deaths reported
8 Oct 2005	Kashmir, Pakistan	7.6	26	70,000 to 86,000
26 Oct 2015	Hindu Kush, Afghanistan	7.5	About 210	Nearly 400
21 Mar 2023	Badakhshan, Afghanistan	6.5	About 190	21
31 Aug 2025	Kunar, eastern Afghanistan	6.0	8	More than 2,200
25 Oct 2026	Hindu Kush, Afghanistan	5.2	About 110	None reported

Source: USGS; EMSC; World Bank; AP; WHO; Afghan and Pakistani officials.

The 2015 quake struck 11 years ago this week, and most of its victims were in Pakistan. In March 2002, a magnitude 7.4 quake in almost the same spot killed more than 150 people, the USGS says.

The 2005 Kashmir earthquake remains the benchmark for disaster in the region. It was shallow, struck about 330 km southeast of the 2015 epicenter on a different fault, and the USGS puts the toll at 86,000 or more; the World Bank uses “over 70,000”.

Kunar was deadly for reasons that had little to do with magnitude. The quake was shallow, it struck close to villages of mud and stone houses on steep slopes, and landslides blocked the roads rescuers needed. The World Health Organization reported more than 2,200 deaths, in line with the Afghan government’s count.

Building codes since 2005: written, not always followed

The 2005 disaster changed Pakistan’s rules on paper. In 2007 the country added detailed seismic provisions to its national building code, modeled on the U.S. Uniform Building Code of 1997, and set up the NDMA and provincial disaster authorities. At the end of 2021, the 2007 code was replaced by the Building Code of Pakistan 2021, which is based on the International Building Code and maps seismic hazard in finer detail, according to a 2024 study in Scientific Reports by Pakistani engineers.

Enforcement is the weak link. Days after the 2015 quake, the humanitarian news agency IRIN reported that the 2007 provisions had gone largely unenforced, and noted that traditional mud and bamboo “katcha” houses fell outside the code altogether. A 2020 World Bank review found that local building bylaws rarely follow the national code. Citing research at Karachi’s NED University, it said about two-thirds of Pakistan’s buildings are brick masonry and only 8% are reinforced concrete. It estimated that a repeat of the 2005 quake would cause about $2.8 billion in damage to homes alone, nearly twice the earlier losses.

The NDMA does not dispute this. Its own 2026 earthquake guidelines say the risk of death and damage in Pakistan remains high, partly because of widespread non-compliance with building codes.

What most coverage of Hindu Kush quakes gets wrong

The first magnitude is often wrong. In 2015 the USGS first measured the Hindu Kush quake at 7.7 before settling on 7.5, while Pakistan’s Meteorological Department gave 8.1. On Sunday, the EMSC’s first 5.8 became 5.2 within hours. Wait for the revised figure before comparing quakes.

“Deep” has a technical meaning. Seismologists reserve “deep-focus” for quakes below 300 km. Hindu Kush quakes are intermediate-depth. The difference matters because it explains both why they are felt so far and why they usually do limited harm.

Magnitude is a poor guide to damage. Depth, distance from towns and the quality of buildings matter as much. The magnitude 6.0 Kunar quake killed more than five times as many people as the magnitude 7.5 quake of 2015.

No one can say when the next big one will come. “Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake,” the agency says. Pakistan’s NDMA lists the idea that small quakes prevent big ones as a myth: they release some stress on a fault, but not enough to stop a large quake.

How to read the next quake headline

Look up the event on the USGS or EMSC website and check two numbers: magnitude and depth. Of the quakes in the table above, the deep ones killed tens or hundreds of people; the shallow ones killed thousands. A shallow quake of magnitude 6 or more near populated valleys, like Kunar in 2025, is the kind that calls for immediate concern.

What to do: If shaking starts, drop to your hands and knees, cover your head and neck, and hold on until it stops. Our guide on what to do in an earthquake covers what to do before, during and after a quake, including how the advice changes in older mud and brick houses.

The USGS also runs a “Did You Feel It?” survey on each event page, where anyone who felt a quake can report what they experienced. For Sunday’s quake, six people had filed reports by the evening.