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I love the Himalayas with an intensity that’s difficult to express. When I work in them, their beauty awes me, their isolation challenges and excites me, their silence makes my mind peaceful, and their peoples and their cultures have a vitality I revel in. They are the ‘big daddy’ of research in to how mountains form, and their impact on global climate is immense. 

Working in these mountains, trying to understand how they evolved, makes me feel 110% alive, but right now I’m angry with them. On 25 April, their ongoing formation, which I have spent my life studying, resulted in an earthquake and 1000’s of lives were wrecked.

The Himalayas started to form roughly 55 million years ago, when the continents of India and Asia, which were once separated by a large ocean, collided..

This collision is ongoing today, as India continues to push north into Asia at the rate of a few centrimetres per year. The result is increasing stress placed on the rocks, which eventually break, and earthquakes result.

Shallow earthquakes are particularly damaging and many of the Himalayan earthquakes, like the April 2015 quake, are situated at shallow depth on the thrust plane which separates the crust of the Himalaya from the Indian plate being driven northwards beneath it

So such an earthquake came to Nepal as a magnitude 7.8M_w shake at 12 noon local time on 25 April. Safely tucked up in my bed, the first I knew of it was an email from a colleague in the early hours, alerting me to the news. Jumping out of bed, my thoughts focused on my two students, then on field work in Kathmandu. A quick phone call to LEC’s Safety Officer, and we were on the case. From personal experience of being caught up in the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, I already knew that contacting the students would not be straightforward: land lines, mobile networks, internet, would all probably be out.

Nevertheless, within a few hours we had established contact via various circuitous routes, ascertained the students were safe, and embarked on the lengthy task of getting them home; we were certainly not the only people trying to book flights out of Kathmandu that day!

By the end of the weekend, it was job done and, apart from a few radio interviews to explain to the general public why earthquakes occur in Nepal, my life returned to normal, and my thoughts turned to the inhabitants of Nepal, for whom life will be very different for a long time.

Luckily all my Nepali colleagues are OK, but what about all the porters, guides, cooks and drivers who I’ve worked with over the years? It’s likely I’ll never know.  And after the initial emergency relief phase has concluded, what prospects for the future?

It is often said that it is not earthquakes that cause loss of life, it is infrastructure, namely the collapse of poorly-constructed buildings. ‘Building back better’ is the guiding principle of post-disaster recovery. But Nepal is a country with slim resources. A considerable proportion of construction is unregulated, building codes are frequently not adhered to, and the expensive earthquake-resistant structures constructed in more affluent countries are not an option here.

Nevertheless, education and training of the local population in simple measures of good building practice can go a long way to ensuring that residential buildings are constructed with greater seismic-resilience. During the recovery and rebuilding phase, this should be a key priority to enable Nepal to ‘build back better’, as the country looks to the future.

Listen to Yani interviewed on the BBC about the Nepal Earthquake, and her experience digging sediment from the Bay of Bengal - Yani is talking at 1:21:30