A human trigger for the Chengdu earthquake?
JAN 23, 2009
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.023003
Science : Researchers have gone public with evidence that stresses from water piled behind the new Zipingpu Dam in China may have triggered last May the failure of the nearby fault, a failure that went on to rupture almost 300 kilometers of fault and kill some 80,000 people in a devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province.Still, no one is near to proving that the Wenchuan quake was a case of reservoir-triggered seismicity. “There’s no question triggered earthquakes happen,” says seismologist Leonardo Seeber of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. That fact and thenew evidence argue that the quake-dam connection “is worth pursuing further,” he says, but proving triggering “is not easy.” And the Chinese government is tightly holding key data.
© 2009 American Institute of Physics
