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Landslides, Flooding Pose Threats

As Experts Survey Quakes Impact
CHENGDU, CHINAWei Fangqiang knows

what its like when a mountain crumbles:

The Longmenshan, or Dragons Gate
Mountains, are prone to landslides. But
when the physical geographer and seven
colleagues with the Chinese Academy of
Sciences Institute of Mountain Hazards
and Environment (IMHE) in Chengdu
trekked into the area devastated by the
Sichuan earthquake, they were stunned. It
looked as though the hills had been blown
apart. Landslides had flattened severalstory buildings in the town of Beichuan and
annihilated villages that clung to the steep
slopes. In Wenchuan, Wei and his comrades
picked their way across a 70-meter-high,
300-meter-wide rubble pile that had
crushed a hydropower station and blocked
the Chaping River. If an aftershock had
struck, it could have spawned a new landslide where they were walking. It was very,
very dangerous, Wei says.
Landslides unleashed by the rupture of a
more than 200-kilometer section of the
Longmenshan fault, followed by powerful
aftershocks, dammed parts of nine rivers,
creating 24 new lakes. The biggest and most
threatening is 3.5 kilometers upstream of

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Beichuan. If the debris dam were to break,

the resulting flood would threaten relief
workers and researchers in Beichuan.
Were worried about another catastrophe,
says Wei. As Science went to press, experts
with the Ministry of Water Conservation
were weighing options for how to relieve
pressure building up behind the dam.
They had at most a week to act, said
Cheng Genwei, IMHEs vice director.
Down the road from IMHE, researchers
with the Chengdu Institute of Biology (CIB)
were in mourning. Three senior staff members died when the wall of a hostel in the

Guangyuan
Beichuan

Mianyang

WENCHUAN
Chengdu

Shake map. The magnitude-7.9 earthquake centered in Wenchuan brought devastation to the severe
shock zone (red) on the Longmenshan fault.

23 MAY 2008

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Published by AAAS

mountains collapsed as they were dashing

out of the door for safety. (IMHE lost one
staffer in Beichuan.) After a 20 May memorial service, CIB scientists were hoping to
return to work with an ambitious research
agenda, including an examination of habitat
fragmentation and ecological succession in
landslide areas. The earthquake will be a
big driver for research, says CIB ecologist
Bao Weikai. He and colleagues will also be
alert to a grave threat to Sichuans famed
giant pandas: the possibility of a massive
die-off of bamboo, the pandas staple, like
one recorded in a quake 30 years ago.
At 2:28 p.m. local time on 12 May, the
Sichuan earthquake struck with a magnitude of 7.9. It was not a total surprise to
geophysicists, says Mian Liu, a geophysicist at the University of Missouri,
Columbia. It occurred on a well-known,
active fault system, he notes, which in 1933
produced a magnitude-7.5 quake that killed
about 9000 people.
But the death toll of the Sichuan earthquake is horrific. As of 20 May, more than
40,000 people are known to have perished,
including thousands of children. Experts are
asking whether better construction, especially at schools, could have prevented
many deaths. Earthquakes themselves do
not kill people, says Liu. The biggest killer,
he says, is structural collapsea point so
sadly illustrated by this earthquake. It
appears that many wrecked buildings were
not reinforced. One hardly sees steel

www.sciencemag.org

CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): COURTESY OF WEI FANGQIANG/IMHE; USGS

SICHUAN DISASTER

Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on August 21, 2015

On the fault. A massive

landslide crushed some
buildings in Beichuan.

CREDIT: COURTESY OF WEI FANGQIANG/IMHE

FOCUS

beams extruding from the collapsed buildings, Liu says. When they are seen, they
are so thin that they bent with the debris like
overcooked noodles.
Under a makeshift canopy next to a swimming pool at a community center in the hardhit historic town of Dujiangyan, west of the
epicenter, geophysicist Miao Chong-Gang
points to a map on his laptop overlain with
seven circles in a line on the Longmenshan
fault. Its the latest data from Chinas seismic
monitoring network showing that the
Sichuan earthquake was composed of seven
powerful sequential ruptures unleashed
when the fault ruptured southwest to northeast. Several years ago, we could not do an
analysis like this, says Miao. But with more
than 1000 seismometers now in a digital
network, China can now parse data like this
in a few hours.
Within 30 minutes after the quake hit, the
China Earthquake Administration (CEA) in
Beijing had crunched the numbers and issued
a preliminary forecast of at least 7000 deaths.
Their assessment would prove to be an underestimate, but it was alarming enough to
prompt CEA to mount a full-scale response.
Miao, vice-director of CEAs Earthquake
Emergency Management Department
Response Command Center, led a 230person team to Dujiangyan late in the evening
on 12 May. His group, one of 187 rescue
teams in the disaster area, has saved 48 people;
in the morning of 19 May, they were elated to
have saved a 61-year-old woman who had
survived 163 hours in the rubble.
Miaos team was about to switch from
rescue to recovery. Among their tasks over
the next 2 months, Miao says, is to groundtruth the computer-generated data. That will
mean conducting seismic, strong-motion,
and geologic surveys and running tests on
everything from geomagnetism to water
chemistry. Such research must wait until the
aftershocks have subsided. Several CEA
volunteers who were ferrying food and
water on foot into the disaster zone were
among more than 150 relief workers known
to have died in aftershock-induced landslides. The slides also claimed the lives of
two Sichuan Earthquake Administration
researchers who were measuring crust
deformation. We have almost no experience in responding to an earthquake in a
mountainous area, says Miao.

Five-way symbiosis

Gamma ray vision

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Back in Chengdu, CIB scientists are itching to get out into the field. A week after the
quake, 10 of their colleagues were alive but
stranded at CIBs Maoxian Mountain Ecosystem Research Station in a pine forest 220
kilometers northwest of Chengdu. The institute had a couple of dozen long-term projects
in the disaster area, a biodiversity hot spot
that encompasses 22 nature reserves. Theyll
have to write a new research plan. The earthquake has dramatically changed the landscape, says CIB ecologist Luo Peng.
One urgent task is to monitor bamboo.
The plant flowers once every 70 years or so.
Shortly after a powerful earthquake in the
1970s, large swaths of bamboo suddenly
flowered and died, says CIB ecologist Pan
Kai-Wen. How a quake might trigger flowering is a mystery, but a large-scale die-off, he
Risky research. IMHE scientists
assess a landslide that has
dammed a river.

says, could pose a big threat to Chinas

endangered giant pandas.
To map the landslides, Wei and his
IMHE colleagues ventured into the danger
zone on 15 May. They had to abandon their
car where a landslide had blocked the highway and head toward Beichuan on foot.
Traveling in the other direction was a
ragged stream of refugees. When the
researchers reached Beichuan the next day,
they found that although many buildings
had collapsed from the shaking, many others were demolished by massive boulders.
In some places, the landslides did more
damage than the earthquake, Wei says.
We know the rock is very loose here. But
still I was surprised that the landslides were
so severe. In a nearby village, a woman was
on top of a pancaked building. She was
calling her sons name, trying to wake him

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up. There was no one else around.

Wei and his colleagues could not get past
a blocked mountain pass leading to the
biggest landslide, a 2-kilometer-long debris
flow that had clogged the Qingjiang River. To
ward off a catastrophic breach, Cheng says,
the preferred option is to dig a canal that
drains the lake gradually. If thats impossible,
he says, theyll have to blast the dam and
allow a more chaotic release. Sichuans rainy
season starts in late June; if the rains start
early, before the problem is dealt with, the
situation could be very dangerous, says Wei.
The IMHE researchers plan to head into
the field as early as next week to sample
landslide material and draw topographic
maps. A future task is to advise authorities
on a safe place to rebuild Beichuan city. The
original site will almost surely be abandoned. It should be a memorial to the earthquake victimsand a reserve for seismic
research, says Miao. CIB scientists hope to
turn the disaster into an opportunity to
advise Longmenshan residents about more
sustainable livelihoods in the fragile mountain ecosystem. One practice they want to
see ended is farming on the steep slopes.
Better forest cover could reduce the landslide risk, says Luo: We need a new strategy
of mountain development.
Others say the Sichuan disaster should
stimulate China to rethink its entire
approach to earthquake research. In recent
decades, geophysicists have spent too much
energy and funding on research on deepearth structure or tectonics, says Zhou
Shiyong, a geophysicist at Peking University. He argues that more attention should be
devoted to earthquake prediction. We could
f ind some precursors, he says, such as
abnormal patterns in seismic stress or underwater variation before a huge quake occurs.
Miao counters that any precursors of the
Sichuan quake were minimal. They could
not have given us any warning, he says.
One thing that will surely come under
scrutiny is Chinas construction standards.
More effort should be devoted to earthquake hazards analysis and management,
including developing and enforcing proper
building codes, especially for schools, hospitals, and other public buildings, Liu says.
For thousands of victims in Sichuan, that
lesson came too late.
RICHARD STONE
With reporting by Chen Xi and Hao Xin.

23 MAY 2008

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