April 2015 Nepal earthquake
The magnitude 7.8 to 7.9 earthquake that struck central Nepal on 25 April 2015 killed 8,962 people across four countries, most of them in Nepal, and left about 3.5 million people homeless. It toppled the nineteenth-century Dharahara tower and damaged or destroyed more than thirty monuments across the Kathmandu Valley's historic squares, triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest that killed at least nineteen climbers, the deadliest single incident on the mountain's record, and buried the village of Langtang under a slide two to three kilometres wide. Geophysicists had warned for years that the Central Himalayan Gap, unruptured since 1505, held enough accumulated energy for a major quake, and the roughly ten billion dollars in damage this one caused amounted to about half of Nepal's annual economic output.
