Delivered a talk during People of CEGE at UCL on the 1897 Great Assam Earthquake

I delivered a talk titled “Love Letter from Epicenter: The Story of the 1897 Great Assam Earthquake”, the following is the abstract of the talk. A related essay can be found in my blog.

Abstract On the afternoon of 12 June 1897, the eastern Himalaya region experienced one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. What followed was an unlikely cast of characters from British-raj India: an administrator whose elegant bungalow crumbled to red dust; a geologist in Calcutta writing urgent dispatches to his wife while improvising a seismometer from tin, bamboo, and a glass bead; and a field scientist who walked the shattered landscape to produce a memoir that would anchor scientific debate for over a century. This talk traces the earthquake through these fragmented, partial, and deeply human records and follows the thread a century forward, to when two seismologists finally found the fault that caused it all, and named it after the man who had been looking in almost the right place. This is a story about science, power, and a forgotten earthquake from my hometown.