Looking for Missing Links in Kashmir: An Update on Nineteenth‐Century Seismicity

Abstract

Nineteenth century Kashmir witnessed military interventions as well as foreign invasions of different ethnic and religious entities. Coups d’etat, coupled with sporadic appearances of epidemics and other natural disasters, were also prevalent. Despite all these upheavals, the influx of various European travelers and their attention to natural phenomena such as earthquakes immensely contributed to knowledge of the earthquake history of this remote pastoral valley. According to the latest issue of the Kashmir seismic catalog, the area has a centuries‐old history of moderate magnitude events (Ahmad et al. , 2009). However, this picture might be incomplete, as suggested by the recent discovery of previously unknown earthquakes that occurred in the nineteenth century. The objective of the present research is to fill the information gaps regarding the occurrences of known earthquakes in the Kashmir Valley and neighboring regions and to identify previously unknown seismic events. As part of this work, six previously unreported earthquakes have been identified, and information on five previously reported earthquakes has been updated. This was achieved by studying historical documents coeval to the events. Nineteenth‐century Kashmir was seriously affected by several earthquakes, which occurred in 1803, 1819, 1828, 1863, and 1885 (Ahmad et al. , 2009). Several studies on particular events (e.g., 1828 and 1885) have been recently published by Bilham et al. (2010) and Ahmad et al. (2014), respectively. These seismic events are known as having been among the largest in this region in the nineteenth century, as they caused major damage to the natural and built environments. Moreover, in the published historical seismic catalogs of Kashmir (e.g., Iyengar et al. , 1999; Ahmad et al. , 2009), specific seismic information gaps (blank time windows with regard to the occurrences of seismic events) have been evident and only recently filled by Ahmad and Shafi (2014) through the rediscovery of a fair …