The mountains north of Kathmandu are heavily populated, with terraced fields and villages on very steep, landslide-prone slopes.
"The impact of the earthquake in these regions is going to be dreadful," Petley wrote in his blog on Sunday, in which he also detailed some estimates other researchers have done to quickly assess the landslide.
He also points out that there has been a lot of confusion about the area affected by the main magnitude 7.8 event. When the U.S. Geological Survey posted its initial maps of Saturday's earthquake, it featured something rarely seen: a smudge of scarlet indicating the highest, most violent shaking on their scale.
If that was not awful enough, the smudge had swallowed up Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. But the map also had a star indicating that the epicenter of the quake was 50 miles (80 km) to the west of Kathmandu and far from the red smudge.
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