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According to the scientists, the aftermath of the big earthquake that struck Nepal this year could have been much worse. A review published by an international team showed that the number of landslides were far less than what the people expected. In fact, the group of researchers did not find any staggering evidence of Himalayan glacial lakes being damaged as a result. The evaluation of the study has been published in Science magazine. In the largest annual gathering of Earth Scientists called, American Geophysical Union, presented at San Francisco suggested that "there were a lot of surprises," said study lead Jeffery Kargel from the University of Arizona, Tucson. "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," he told BBC News.

"It was a really bad earthquake -- over 9,000 fatalities in four countries, primarily Nepal," said Kargel, senior associate research scientist in the University of Arizona. "As horrific as this was, the situation could have been far worse for an earthquake of this magnitude." When Kargel learned of the earthquake, he considered his options of offering helping from 8,000 miles away. "For the first 24 hours after the quake I was beside myself suffering for my friends and the country of Nepal that I so love," he said. "I thought, what can I do? I'm sitting here in Tucson -- how can I help Nepal?" He realized that his specialization in satellite imaging would be able to detect where the landslides had happened, especially in the remote mountain villages, says Science Daily.

The images were contributed by more than 10 satellites from four countries that provided the data and the required images to analyze and report the geological dangers, including the landslides followed by the earthquake, as reported by Business Standard.