More than 1,700 people have now fallen victim to the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck the center of Myanmar on March 28. Myanmar is one of the most seismically active countries in southeast Asia, having suffered nine major quakes in the past ten years. But why do earthquakes happen so frequently in this region?

This region sits atop a boundary of two tectonic plates, where pieces of Earth’s crust are sliding past each other, in along a type of boundary called a transform fault. As the western part of the country slides north, and the eastern part slides south, it produces friction along this fault line, in the same way that rubbing your hands together produces heat. Over time, the pressure along the fault line builds, until it releases all of its stored energy at once, in the form of an earthquake.