An earthquake that hit China’s Qinghai Province early this morning has killed around 400 and injured 10,000 more, according to state news reports.
The United States Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 6.9 quake at 07:50, local time. Several aftershocks have also hit the region.
According to the USGS population exposure assessment, 48,000 people are within the area where strong shaking could potentially cause moderate damage to vulnerable structures. “Overall, the population in this region resides in structures that are highly vulnerable to earthquake shaking, though some resistant structures exist,” says the assessment.
Other reports suggest things could be worse than this assessment makes out. BBC correspondent Damian Grammaticas reports, “Jiegu is a town of 30,000 people and 80% of the buildings there are said to be flattened. One local official said power was off, water was off, there are reports that a hospital is damaged, and that at least one school has come down and students have been trapped.”
State news agency Xinhua – which puts the quake at 7.1 magnitude – says many people are buried under collapsed houses. Power and communications links have been downed and workers are struggling to prevent water leaking from a damaged reservoir.
Image: USGS
The epicentre of today’s quake was around 10 km deep.
Kevin McCue, director of the Australian Seismological Centre, said in a statement, “Today’s earthquake in China is an intraplate earthquake, ie it did not occur on a boundary between plates but within a plate. The earthquake ruptured a fault that was perhaps 40km long and its mechanism was principally strike-slip, like the San Andreas Fault in California, the fault motion was horizontal, one side of the fault moving sideways relative to the other side, perhaps two metres.”
In May 2008 a 7.9 magnitude quake struck the eastern Sichuan region in China, some 19 km deep. That quake killed 70,000 people, triggering a reappraisal of both earthquake research and building standards (see: The sleeping dragon).