Nepal's latest earthquake was primed in 1934

Geologists have revealed that the Nepal's devastating magnitude-7.9 earthquake followed the historic pattern and it was primed over 80 years ago.

Its last massive earthquake was in 1934, which razed around a quarter of Kathmandu to the ground and killed over 17,000 people, the BBC reported.

This latest quake followed the same pattern as a duo of big tremors that occurred over 700 years ago, and resulted from a domino effect of strain transferring along the fault.

Laurent Bollinger, from the CEA research agency in France, and his colleagues, uncovered the historical pattern of earthquakes during fieldwork in Nepal in March, and anticipated a major earthquake in exactly the location where big tremor of April 25 has taken place.

Down in the jungle in central southern Nepal, Bollinger's team dug trenches across the country's main earthquake fault, at the place where the fault meets the surface, and used fragments of charcoal buried within the fault to carbon-date when the fault had last moved.

Previously, the team had worked on the neighbouring segment of fault, which lies to the east of Kathmandu, and had shown that this segment experienced major quakes in 1255, and then more recently in 1934.

In fact, the team has warned that there could be more to come if followed the pattern.