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A powerful earthquake tore through a remote corner of Tibet late on Thursday night, killing at least 16 people and reducing hundreds of homes to rubble. The magnitude 7.0 tremor struck at 10:33pm local time, its epicentre in the high mountains of Nagqu — a sparsely populated region where rescue teams are now racing winter cold, rockfalls and severed communications to reach survivors.
What happened
According to Al Jazeera, citing China's state news agency Xinhua, the quake's epicentre was in Maru township in Baqen county — a mountainous area about 190 kilometres east-northeast of Nagqu and roughly 390 kilometres northeast of the regional capital, Lhasa. The US Geological Survey put the depth at around 10 kilometres, which is shallow enough to make the shaking at the surface far more destructive than a deeper quake of the same magnitude.
The human toll is still being counted. Xinhua, citing Nagqu's emergency management bureau, reported 16 dead and at least 32 injured — 11 of them seriously. Some outlets, citing state broadcaster CCTV, put the injured figure at 46, so the official count may still rise. At least 339 homes collapsed, the Nagqu media office said. The Indian Express, citing AP's reporting of official media, described rescue operations underway after the collapse of homes and livestock sheds across the area.
The rescue effort
China activated a Level-II earthquake disaster emergency response — the second-highest tier — and more than 1,600 people from the local county were deployed for search and rescue. Supplies rushed to the region included around 3,000 tents, 1,000 prefabricated housing units, folding beds, flashlights and winter clothing: a reminder that this is a high-altitude plateau where nights are already freezing.
The quake knocked out communications in parts of the region, local railway authorities halted trains running through the area as an emergency measure, and rockfalls forced authorities to shut down a section of National Highway 317 — leaving only emergency, rescue and official vehicles to pass while crews clear the debris. State media footage showed residents fleeing their homes into the streets and sheltering in parked cars.
Why this region shakes
Tibet sits on one of the most restless pieces of crust on Earth. The Indian tectonic plate is still driving northward into the Eurasian plate — the slow-motion collision that built the Himalayas — and the stress it generates is released in exactly these kinds of shallow, violent ruptures. The January 2025 quake in Tingri county, which killed at least 126 people, was the same geological story.
This is the strongest earthquake to hit China since January 2024, according to Al Jazeera's reporting. And it lands on a region already battered: back in August, devastating flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border killed more than 1,400 people — a disaster this blog covered in its account of the Budhi Gandaki floods. Two catastrophes in three months on the same mountain frontier is a grim run of luck, and it is stretching local disaster-response capacity thin.
The casualty figure of 16 will almost certainly be revised as teams reach the villages closest to the epicentre — some of which, Xinhua reported, already show cracked walls and damaged houses. For now, the priority is shelter before nightfall. Unlike a false alarm — which readers may remember from our report on Japan's false 9.9 earthquake alert — this one was real, shallow, and directly under people's homes. The coming days will tell how many of them are still standing.