A powerful earthquake measuring magnitude 7.0 struck China's Tibet region late on Thursday night, killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more, according to state media reports. The tremor, which struck at around 10:33 pm local time, was the strongest to hit China in nearly two years and sent rescue teams racing through the darkness to a remote, high-altitude epicentre in the mountains of northern Tibet.
The United States Geological Survey placed the epicentre in a sparsely populated, mountainous area of Nagqu, some 183 to 191 kilometres east-northeast of Nagqu city and roughly 390 kilometres northeast of the regional capital, Lhasa. Chinese state media identified the epicentre as Maru township in Baqen county. The quake struck at a shallow depth of about 10 kilometres, a factor that seismologists say tends to intensify the shaking felt at the surface.
Within five kilometres of the epicentre, the average elevation is around 4,864 metres — nearly 16,000 feet above sea level — making the affected area one of the most difficult terrains on earth for emergency responders.
The toll was still emerging as dawn broke on Friday. Xinhua, China's official state news agency, citing the Nagqu City emergency management bureau, reported that at least 16 people had been killed and more than 32 injured. Eleven of the injured were described as seriously hurt and 21 as having minor injuries, as of about 2:25 am on Friday.
The numbers may yet change: authorities were still assessing the damage across scattered mountain settlements, and rescue teams had only begun reaching some of the worst-hit areas.
Houses bore the brunt of the shaking. At least 339 homes collapsed entirely, while another 20 livestock sheds were destroyed, state media said. In a region where many rural dwellings are built of traditional materials ill-suited to withstand violent lateral shaking, the scale of the destruction to housing was expected. Power lines were knocked down and telecommunication networks disrupted in parts of the affected zone, complicating the early hours of the response.
The earthquake triggered a major mobilisation of state resources. The China Earthquake Administration activated a level-II emergency response, the second-highest tier in the country's four-level disaster response system, signalling that Beijing considered the event a significant national emergency. More than 300 police officers and 347 fire and rescue personnel were deployed to the quake zone, alongside over 1,600 local emergency workers.
Relief supplies were dispatched at speed: some 1,000 prefabricated housing units, roughly 3,000 tents and folding beds, and consignments of flashlights and winter clothing were being sent to the affected counties. With nighttime temperatures on the high Tibetan plateau already near or below freezing in late October, warmth and shelter were immediate priorities for survivors whose homes had been reduced to rubble.
Transport links were also affected. Railway authorities suspended train services through the affected areas while engineers checked tracks and tunnels for damage. A section of National Highway 317, a vital artery through northern Tibet, was closed after rockfalls blocked parts of the carriageway; only emergency and rescue vehicles were being allowed through.
Officials warned that intermittent snow was expected over the following three days, a forecast that threatened to slow rescue work and add to the misery of displaced residents camping in the open.
The quake's power was felt far beyond its epicentre. Tremors were reported in Lhasa and across parts of Nagqu prefecture, and residents in several areas described being woken by strong shaking that rattled buildings and sent people fleeing into the streets. While no damage of significance was reported in the capital, the psychological impact of a late-night tremor of this magnitude was felt across the region.
Geologically, the disaster was no surprise to scientists. The Tibetan plateau sits atop the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, a slow-motion collision that has been raising the Himalayas for tens of millions of years and that makes the entire region one of the most seismically active on the planet. The plateau is laced with active faults, and powerful earthquakes have struck it repeatedly through recorded history.
Thursday's quake was the strongest to hit China since January 2024, when a 7.1-magnitude tremor struck the Xinjiang region and killed three people.
The memory of an even more recent Tibetan disaster looms over this one. In January 2025, an earthquake in Tingri county, Tibet, killed at least 126 people and injured hundreds, destroying thousands of homes in the shadow of Mount Everest. That tragedy exposed the vulnerability of the region's traditional building stock and prompted a renewed push to reinforce rural housing.
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake in Yushu in the neighbouring province of Qinghai in 2010 killed at least 2,698 people, a reminder of how catastrophic shallow quakes can be in this part of the world.
Thursday night's disaster has also drawn attention to the sheer difficulty of disaster response at extreme altitude. Rescue teams operating at nearly 5,000 metres face thin air that exhausts even fit responders, freezing temperatures, and long distances between settlements on poor roads. Heavy equipment is hard to move in, and helicopters struggle with the thin atmosphere.
The darkness of the first hours, compounded by severed power and communications, meant that the first assessments came from local officials and villagers rather than professional rescue crews.
International monitoring agencies recorded the quake within minutes. The USGS's rapid location data helped Chinese authorities narrow the epicentre and scale the response, while news of the disaster spread quickly through international media early on Friday morning. Neighbouring countries with territory along the same fault systems — including India, Nepal and Bhutan — watched the reports closely, as quakes on the plateau have historically been felt across the Himalayan front.
As of Friday morning, the search and rescue operation was still in its critical early phase. Emergency teams were combing through collapsed buildings for survivors, medical teams were treating the injured, and temporary shelters were being erected for those who had lost their homes. The level-II emergency response status ensures that national-level resources remain available, and officials said the response would be adjusted as fuller damage assessments arrived.
The full picture of the damage is expected to become clearer over the coming days, but authorities have cautioned that the figures released so far are preliminary. In the remote counties of Nagqu, where villages are scattered across vast valleys and communication remains patchy, it can take days for every settlement to be reached and accounted for.
For now, the focus is on the injured and the displaced — and on ensuring that the coming cold nights do not add to the toll of an already devastating quake.
(Reporting based on CNN, Al Jazeera and The Economic Times.)