Earthquakes in Afghanistan: Live Map & the Hindu Kush Deep Quakes

Afghanistan straddles two very different sources of earthquake hazard. In the north-east, the Hindu Kush region is one of the most seismically active spots on the planet at intermediate and deep focus — a knot of subducted, fragmenting lithosphere beneath the mountains that regularly produces earthquakes over 150 km deep, felt across a huge radius from Kabul to Pakistan and northern India, yet rarely as destructive at the surface as a shallow quake of the same magnitude.

Western Afghanistan carries a different, shallower risk. In October 2023, a series of earthquakes up to magnitude 6.3 struck near Herat, Afghanistan's third-largest city, in under two weeks. The shallow, repeated shaking flattened mud-brick villages across Herat province, killed more than 1,000 people, and displaced tens of thousands, exposing how little the country's rural housing stock can absorb even moderate, shallow earthquakes.

Decades of conflict have left Afghanistan with almost no functioning seismic monitoring network or enforced building code, so casualty figures after a quake often depend more on how remote and how poorly built the affected villages are than on the earthquake's raw magnitude. International agencies such as the USGS, together with neighbouring countries' networks, provide most of the instrumental data used to track Afghan earthquakes today.