Special supplement: Chengdu 'safe as a steel pot'

By By Huang Zhiling (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-06 11:06

At 2:28 pm on May 12, a magnitude-8 earthquake hit Wenchuan county, Sichuan province.

Within 80 seconds, houses collapsed and mountains and rivers moved in many parts of the province. But Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan less than 100 km from the epicenter, was unscathed.

Chengdu residents were fortunate because of the city's underlying geological structure. In any case the city will be free of another nearby magnitude 8 or even higher earthquake for 200 years because of the energy released by the Wenchuan earthquake, according to scholars attending a recent seismic and geological forum held in Chengdu.

Liu Baojun, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a noted geologist, notes that Sichuan's Longmenshan Mountains are on the border of two tectonic plates and formed by the collision of the Indian and the Yangtze plates. Blocked by the Yangtze plate, pressure from the Indian mass resulted in the rise of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

"As the energy and stress which had been accumulating for a long time was released along the fragile Longmenshan faults, they led to crustal deformation, rupture and the earthquake," Liu said.

Although Chengdu is not far away, the Yangtze mass on which Chengdu is located belongs to a completely different geological structure, and the Longmenshan faults separate the earthquake zone from Chengdu.

"If another major earthquake took place along the fault, Chengdu would be safe again," Liu said.

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