China's quake: the dam factor
- From: "CKinSF <ck_in_sf1@xxxxxxxxxxx>" <CKinSF <ck_in_sf1@xxxxxxxxxxx>>
- Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 18:37:00 +0800
China's quake: the dam factor
San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA
A recent article in Scientific American explained the issue and said 19
earthquakes in China over the past 50 years could be blamed on dams. ...
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/foreigndesk/detail?&entry_id=26613>
China's quake: the dam factor
From Kathleen E. McLaughlin, Beijing.
The largest in the world
As Chinese officials continue to grapple with the devastating earthquake that
has killed tens of thousands of people, they have also been seeking to to
reassure the world that the nearby behemoth Three Gorges Dam is safe.
Critics of the dam have long painted a bleak picture of mass death and
destruction in the Yangtze River region should the dam fail. They say its
placement in an earthquake-prone area is one of its most dangerous attributes.
Now, there is speculation that the world's largest and perhaps most
controversial dam was a factor in causing the killer Sichuan province quake.
Scientists from around the world have long theorized that the sheer weight of
the reservoir created by the dam could cause seismic shifts in the area. A
recent article in Scientific American explained the issue and said 19
earthquakes in China over the past 50 years could be blamed on dams.
Though no one has directly fingered Three Gorges as the reason for the
earthquake, Probe International, a Canadian non-profit that monitors China's
dams and their environmental and humanitarian fallout, raises the possibility.
"Whether reservoir-induced seismicity is behind last week's earthquake should be
urgently investigated before the Three Gorges reservoir is filled to its maximum
height," said Patricia Adams, the group's executive director.
Kathleen E. McLaughlin is a Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent. Read her
latest story from the quake region here.
Posted By: Andrew S Ross (Email) | May 19 2008 at 11:24 AM
Listed Under: China | Comments (2) : Post Comment
Comments
Reservoir-induced quakes usually occur within 5 km from the reservoir, no more
than 15km from the reservoir. The Three Gorges Dam is over 700km away from the
epicenter of this killer earthquake. It is unlikely that this earthquake is
caused by the dam. Chinese scientists have already given their initial
conclusions about the cause: conflict of the India land mass and Asia land mass,
and the hardness of Sichuan's land.
Posted By: be_fair | May 19 2008 at 09:25 PM
I have said many critical things about the PRC government's handling of seismic
safety in other articles about the quake, but I have to agree with be_fair about
this one. I don't think there has ever been a structure-induced quake that was
not highly local to the area around the structure itself. And while Three Gorges
is impossibly massive in human terms, it is vanishingly small compared to the
amount of geological mass in between the dam site and the quake site.
Posted By: chris_thorne | May 19 2008 at 10:43 PM
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