Shortly after 10 on Saturday morning, the ground moved under central Balochistan. A strong earthquake struck near Khuzdar, one of the biggest cities in Pakistan’s largest and least developed province, and the shaking was violent enough to send people running out of their homes and shops into the streets.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) — the state agency that monitors earthquakes — measured the quake at magnitude 5.9. Its National Seismic Monitoring Centre in Islamabad put the epicentre about 48 kilometres northwest of Khuzdar, at a depth of 25 kilometres.
The American and German agencies disagreed slightly, which is normal in the first hours. The US Geological Survey (USGS) recorded magnitude 5.7 at just 10 kilometres deep; Germany’s GFZ research centre put it at 5.6, also at 10 kilometres. India’s National Center for Seismology split the difference at 5.8. The USGS issued a yellow alert for the quake, its second-lowest category. Different readings are routine: each agency works from its own station network, and the numbers usually converge as more data arrives.
As of early afternoon, no casualties or serious damage had been reported. Disaster-management authorities began ground assessments in Khuzdar district, and relief teams, hospitals and police in the district were put on alert. The first checks found no major collapses, though officials said remote rural pockets were still being checked. Tremors were also reported in Basima tehsil of neighbouring Washuk district, where people gathered in open spaces reciting the Kalima Tayyaba, the Muslim declaration of faith.
The quake was shallow, and shallow quakes are felt harder. A 5.9 at 10 kilometres depth releases its energy close to the surface, which is why people in Khuzdar described several seconds of violent shaking even though the epicentre was dozens of kilometres away. It was nothing like the largest earthquake in Panama in years — a 7.7 that collapsed buildings and triggered tsunami warnings across Latin America last week.
Balochistan has been rattled repeatedly this year. In August, a 4.8-magnitude quake shook Zhob and Chaman in the north. In July, a magnitude 4 tremor hit Quetta, Ziarat and Harnai. And Khuzdar itself has felt tremors before — a 5.6-magnitude quake struck near the city in February, and a smaller 4.5 one jolted the district just two days ago, on Thursday.
There is a geological reason the ground keeps moving here. Pakistan sits where three of the planet’s great tectonic plates — the Arabian, the Eurasian and the Indian — collide, and the country is divided into five seismic zones. Balochistan’s Makran and Chaman fault systems are among the most active. The 2005 Kashmir earthquake, which killed more than 74,000 people, came from the same slow collision. So did the 1935 Quetta earthquake, which levelled the provincial capital and killed tens of thousands.
That history is what makes Saturday’s quake worth watching beyond Pakistan. Balochistan is Pakistan’s poorest province, and much of its rural housing is built of mud brick and semi-permanent materials — exactly the kind of construction that crumbles in strong shaking, as the 2021 Harnai quake showed when it destroyed thousands of mud homes. A 5.9 with no casualties is good fortune. A 7 in the same place would be a different story entirely.
The numbers, for now, are the reassuring kind. The next few hours will tell whether they stay that way.
And one thing no agency can yet do, as we explained in our Explains piece, is tell you where the next one will strike: why scientists still can’t predict earthquakes.
