Chinese Dam May Have Triggered Last Year's Catastrophic Earthquake

New York Times:

BEIJING - Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake's geological fault line.

A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[PlayTOE]

08:43 AM on 02/09/2009

Adding a reservoir to a fault line will hasten and add slightly to the earth movement, but the earthquake is going to happen in any event. It is the crust shifting that causes an earthquake, not a little water sitting on the surface.

As for buildings in earthquake zones not being built to withstand an earthquake? There are No excuses. We have the technology. We can make quake proof buildings.

[lvogt]

11:08 PM on 02/07/2009

It seems logical to me that earthquakes are going to happen in these places but that such changes in the environment may change when they happen. It also occurs to me that if the distribution of water around the planet changes it could alter the location and timing of earthquakes and volcanoes. That may be trivial unless it makes them larger or more frequent. It's recently estimated that a sufficient loss of antarctic ice could free the land mass to rise 100 meters and even shift the earths rotation. This would certainly be a large change in the distribution of energy. Mass lessened one place would be added elsewhere. I have a tough time believing that would have no effect but I'm just speculating.

[garbacue09]

01:56 PM on 02/07/2009

Who needs nukes when you can muck up your enemies with earthquakes! Don't encourage the bastards with dreams of military applications.

[ashabot]

11:20 AM on 02/07/2009

Here in America, we prefer building on fault lines. What could possibly go wrong? After all, it's America? We're above all the laws, even Nature's.

[FairTalk]

01:57 AM on 02/07/2009

Gee, I wonder what caused the greater than 7 earth quakes of the 1930s and 1970s in nearly the same place?

[haramagoti]

02:08 AM on 02/07/2009

movement of the exact same fault?

[cinesimon]

08:04 PM on 02/06/2009

And America wants to store it's nuclear waste where?

[markinaz]

07:47 PM on 02/06/2009

As bad as this episode was, could another even deadlier episode have occured later on? If this faultline was ready to go, perhaps future lives are going to be saved. Better a 7.2 now than an even bigger one later? It's a philosophical conundrum.

[rich misty]

07:19 PM on 02/06/2009

Large ice melts at the poles probably triggered the Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami.

[RTIII]

03:39 PM on 02/07/2009

Probably _not._
.

[Freenation]

04:27 PM on 02/06/2009

Chinese Govt will never own up to this theory...

[1differentdrummer]

02:36 PM on 02/06/2009

Did the lake lubricate the rock strata? Just asking.

[rich misty]

07:16 PM on 02/06/2009

No, it applied pressure to the fault line.

Water tables locally will rise when a stream or river is dammed, but the fault locations are always located well below the water table... They are as wet and as lubricated as they are ever going to be.

[Horst]

02:22 PM on 02/06/2009

What's Mandarin for "oooops"?

[Telemachus]

02:22 PM on 02/06/2009

I hear they outsourced their environmental impact study to the Bush EPA.

[walk0nwalls]

02:03 PM on 02/06/2009

Guess what's not getting through the Chinese censors today!

[TJCole]

01:12 PM on 02/06/2009

This could be the greatest engineering disaster in history at 80,000 deaths..!

Chernobyl might in the long run have killed more than 80,000 we'll never know but this is right up there as very possibly the number one instance of engineering failure...!

You'd think they might have given more consideration to the tectonic effect of all that weigh from the reservoir right on a fault...!

[PoliticalAmazon]

01:01 PM on 02/06/2009

How in the world do you get the opinion that this story has been sensationalized? Apparently, the researchers involved in the assessment are well-respected experts. The initial findings should be published, especially if there is the possibility that China may be creating similar problems at other sites, where they are building dams on known active faults.

The weight of the water of the dam exerted an estimated 25-times the normal seismic pressure on the fault. Couple that with "water diffusion," and the dam certainly changed the environment significantly in favor of a fault rupturing, causing an earthquake.

There are other dam-related earthquakes on record, so this is not a brand new idea they have come up with.