According to a new report, the devastating magntitude-7.8 earthquake that hit Nepal in April 2015 could have been even much, much worse than what occurred. Recently, an international team has published a review of the events that the impacts stemming from the big earthquakes was much lower than people feared. On analyzing hundreds of thousands of satellite images taken before and after Nepal’s Gorkha quake, a 64-member team has been able to count only 4,312 landslides. Though, the quake resulted in huge devastation in Nepal, it still triggered slope failures much less severe than its magnitude would suggest. But, by any measure the Nepal quakes in April and May were devastating; more than eight and a half thousand people lost their lives.

Niels Hovius, who studies landslides at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, said some mountains were hit very hard during the quake and some were left barely scratch able. Jeffrey Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said the ground shook very less strongly than ever expected from the quake’s magnitude. The main reason for this is that the rupture occurred 10-15 kilometers underground along a long, narrow segment of the main Himalayan geological fault near Kathmandu, which never reached the surface.

The most violent impact occurred in the Langtang valley, north of Kathmandu, where ice and rock crashed 3.75 kilometers down a slope onto a riverbed. The impact sent a powerful wind blasting down the valley, flattening structures. It has been reported that wind speeds exceeded 322 kilometers per hour and the impact released half as much energy as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. Hovius said that the most important thing that matters is the size of landslides and the total volume of debris they mobilize. The study published in Science magazine has been presented in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Jeffery said “The nature of the earthquakes' influence on the landscape, from the largest scales to the smaller scales, was not really as we would have expected”.

EurekAlert report said, in addition, no large floods from overflowing glacial lakes occurred after the magnitude 7.8 quake, which struck near the town of Gorkha, Nepal on April 25, 2015.

"It was a really bad earthquake - over 9,000 fatalities in four countries, primarily Nepal," said lead author Jeffrey Kargel, senior associate research scientist in the University of Arizona department of hydrology and water resources. "As horrific as this was, the situation could have been far worse for an earthquake of this magnitude."

According to a report from the Nature, Historically, landslides after earthquakes have drastically reshaped the geography of Nepal. The country’s second-largest city, Pokhara, is built on between 4 billion and 5 billion cubic metres of debris from landslides triggered by three medieval earthquakes, each greater than magnitude 8, according to an analysis in a separate paper published today in Science2 by a team led by geomorphologist Wolfgang Schwanghart of the University of Potsdam.

“Landslide hazards are the biggest challenge for resettling displaced populations,” says Dixit. “Getting an accurate picture of where landslides are and how they will evolve is essential for any reconstruction plans.”

The impacts stemming from the big earthquakes that struck Nepal earlier this year could have been much, much worse, say scientists. An international team has just published a review of the events, showing the number of landslides was far lower than people had feared. And the group could find no evidence of Himalayan glacial lakes suffering significant damage - a key concern, told The BBC.