Moderate quake in Pakistan’s far north kills two, triggers landslides and briefly cuts Karakoram Highway

The shaking started just after 11:20 a.m., a low rumble beneath the stone farmhouses of Pakistan’s far north. Crockery clattered, doors swung open and, on the sheer cliffs above the Karakoram Highway, slabs of rock began to peel away.

Within seconds, boulders and dust crashed onto the winding road that links Pakistan to China. By the time the tremors stopped on Jan. 19, a moderate earthquake centered near the remote settlement of Barishal in Gilgit-Baltistan had left at least two people dead, several others injured and more than 300 homes damaged across scattered mountain valleys.

A mid-sized quake with outsized impacts

The magnitude 5.6 to 5.8 quake—depending on which seismic network is consulted—was far from the most powerful to hit northern Pakistan. But the landslides and structural damage it triggered underscored how even mid-sized earthquakes can upend life and briefly sever one of Asia’s most strategic transport corridors.

Seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey measured the event at magnitude 5.6 and a depth of about 35 kilometers, with an epicenter roughly 50 kilometers north-northwest of Barishal. Pakistan’s National Seismic Monitoring Centre, run by the Pakistan Meteorological Department, reported a magnitude of 5.8 and a shallower depth of 10 kilometers.

The quake struck at 11:21 a.m. local time (6:21 a.m. GMT). It was widely felt across Gilgit-Baltistan—including Hunza, Nagar, Ghizer and Gilgit—and in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa such as Swat and Peshawar. Residents in Islamabad and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi also reported light shaking.

Deaths, injuries and damaged homes

Initial reports from local officials on Jan. 19 said one person had been killed and two injured, with “dozens” of mud-brick houses damaged. As rescue teams reached more isolated settlements over the following day, the toll rose.

By Jan. 20, regional authorities and humanitarian briefings were reporting at least two people killed, four injured and damage to more than 300 houses, along with cattle sheds and small public buildings. Most of the affected homes were traditional stone and mud structures in high-altitude villages.

One of the victims was a 60-year-old man traveling by motorcycle near Barswat Lake in the Ishkoman Valley of Ghizer district. A rockfall triggered by the shaking struck the motorcycle, killing him and injuring another man, according to Gilgit-Baltistan’s caretaker information minister, Ghulam Abbas.

“A huge mass of rocks came down suddenly when the tremors hit,” Abbas told local reporters. “One man died on the spot and another was taken to a nearby health facility.”

In the Chapursan Valley, a remote cluster of settlements near the Afghan border, local officials said homes and livestock shelters collapsed or cracked heavily. Two children and a woman were among the injured and were transferred to the Rural Health Centre in Sust, a small town on the Karakoram Highway near the Chinese border crossing at Khunjerab Pass.

District administrators warned that initial figures likely understated the damage because several roads remained blocked.

“We cannot give a final number until access is restored to the upper villages,” a deputy commissioner in Hunza district said in a televised briefing. “Our assessment teams are waiting for the roads to open.”

Landslides briefly disrupt a strategic corridor

The earthquake triggered multiple landslides and rockfalls along the Karakoram Highway and adjoining roads, temporarily disrupting traffic on a route that serves as the backbone of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Local television footage showed dust clouds billowing from steep slopes and piles of debris on narrow sections of the highway. Heavy machinery from the Gilgit-Baltistan Communication and Works Department was deployed to clear the road, and officials said most blocked stretches were reopened within hours.

Even short disruptions highlight the vulnerability of the “China-Pakistan Friendship Highway”—a roughly 1,300-kilometer road linking Hasan Abdal in Punjab province to Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region—to natural hazards. Studies using satellite-based measurements have found that about one-tenth of the corridor runs through zones considered extremely susceptible to landslides, with a much larger share categorized as highly vulnerable.

The highway’s importance has grown with CPEC, a multibillion-dollar package of Chinese-backed infrastructure and energy projects. The route carries goods, tourists and construction materials between Pakistan and China and supplies remote Pakistani communities that have few alternative links to the rest of the country.

In this context, a moderate quake that can trigger slope failures and cut the road, even briefly, is seen by engineers and planners as an ongoing stress test for the corridor’s resilience.

Winter exposure and displacement in mountain villages

Away from the highway, the earthquake’s impact fell hardest on small farming villages perched along river terraces and avalanche paths. In many settlements in Hunza, Chapursan, Nagar and Ghizer, families reported deep cracks in walls, partially collapsed rooms and destroyed animal shelters.

“Our house is unsafe now,” a farmer from upper Hunza said in a phone interview with a local broadcaster. “We spent the night outside with the children because everyone was afraid the walls might fall in an aftershock.”

With winter temperatures dropping below freezing at night, displacement—even on a temporary basis—poses serious challenges. Local Urdu-language media described hundreds of families “under the open sky,” living in tents, makeshift shelters or with relatives while they waited for inspections and guidance on whether it was safe to return home.

A high-risk seismic zone, with climate pressures

Gilgit-Baltistan, a Pakistan-administered territory within the wider Kashmir dispute, is one of the country’s most seismically active regions. It straddles the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which converge at a rate of roughly 4 to 5 centimeters per year. The same broad zone produced the devastating 2005 Kashmir earthquake, which killed around 73,000 people in Pakistan and parts of disputed Kashmir.

Seismologists say that while the Jan. 19 event was far smaller than the 2005 disaster, the pattern of damage is consistent with the region’s geology and building practices.

“Even a magnitude-5 or -6 earthquake can be destructive in mountainous areas where houses are made of unreinforced masonry and slopes are already unstable,” said a senior official at the National Seismic Monitoring Centre in Islamabad. “The combination of steep topography and non-engineered construction is a major concern.”

Climate trends are adding to the risks. Gilgit-Baltistan is home to more than 7,000 glaciers and some of the world’s largest non-polar ice fields. In recent years, unusually high temperatures and heavy rains have contributed to glacial lake outburst floods, mudslides and river erosion. In 2025, a mudslide near Danyor, south of Gilgit, killed volunteers working to repair earlier flood damage and again blocked the Karakoram Highway.

Officials and researchers say warming temperatures can destabilize slopes, making them more likely to fail during earthquakes.

“You have a landscape that is already under stress from melting ice and intense rainfall,” said a disaster risk researcher at a public university in Islamabad. “When an earthquake happens, it doesn’t take much shaking to bring down weakened slopes.”

Aid and rebuilding questions

The government of Gilgit-Baltistan has said it will provide assistance to families whose homes were damaged in the Jan. 19 quake, though details of compensation packages and reconstruction standards have not been fully announced. Pakistan has seismic building codes, but enforcement is uneven, especially in remote areas where most construction is informal and based on local tradition.

For residents of valleys like Chapursan and Ishkoman, the latest earthquake is one more reminder of a cycle of floods, landslides and tremors that has repeatedly tested their resilience—and their confidence in state support.

As crews finished clearing debris from the highway in the days after the quake, a line of trucks and minivans edged forward again toward the Khunjerab Pass, past cliffs scarred by fresh rockfall. In the villages above, families sorted through cracked walls and fallen beams, weighing whether to rebuild as before or wait for help that, in these mountains, has often arrived slowly.