5 years after the Wenchuan earthquake
Beichuan County, located in a mountainous region of Sichuan Province, China, was severely damaged during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. Survivors of the quake have been relocated and the county town now serves as a memorial to the natural disaster. (Image credited to: AlamyCelebrity / Alamy)
The Wenchuan earthquake that occurred in southwest China on 12 May 2008 killed more than 80,000 people and displaced millions. Five years on, many of the affected communities have made a good recovery – at least until the most recent quake in April 2013 wreaked further havoc in the region. The devastating 2008 event has helped invigorate research into earthquake hazards. A collection of opinion pieces, published in Nature Geoscience to mark the fifth anniversary of the 2008 event, discusses the mechanisms for the Wenchuan quake itself and the implications for our understanding of the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, the ongoing risk from quake-induced landslides, and the societal impacts of the earthquake.
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News & Views
Tectonics: Reanimating eastern Tibet -
Michael E. Oskin
doi:10.1038/ngeo1564
The high eastern Tibetan Plateau was thought to have formed from an inflow of material from the lower crust. The cooling histories of rocks exposed at the plateau margin, however, reveal protracted, episodic growth, suggesting that faulting also played a role.
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Letters
Crustal deformation of the eastern Tibetan plateau revealed by magnetotelluric imaging -
Denghai Bai, Martyn J. Unsworth, Max A. Meju, Xiaobing Ma, Jiwen Teng, Xiangru Kong, Yi Sun, Jie Sun, Lifeng Wang, Chaosong Jiang, Ciping Zhao, Pengfei Xiao & Mei Liu
doi:10.1038/ngeo830
Deformation of the Himalaya and Tibet is thought to relate to flow within a weak crustal channel at depth. Magnetotelluric imaging of the Earth's subsurface reveals a complex pattern of deformation, with two distinct weak crustal channels at 20–40km depth.
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Mass wasting triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake is greater than orogenic growth -
Robert N. Parker, Alexander L. Densmore, Nicholas J. Rosser, Marcello de Michele, Yong Li, Runqiu Huang, Siobhan Whadcoat & David N. Petley
doi:10.1038/ngeo1154
Shallow earthquakes lead to the uplift of mountain ranges, but also trigger landslides that remove mass. An analysis of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake suggests that more material was removed from the orogen by widespread landslides than was added by coseismic uplift.
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Two-phase growth of high topography in eastern Tibet during the Cenozoic -
E. Wang, E. Kirby, K. P. Furlong, M. van Soest, G. Xu, X. Shi, P. J. J. Kamp & K. V. Hodges
doi:10.1038/ngeo1538
High topography in eastern Tibet is thought to have formed in response to weak lower crust flowing towards the plateau margin. Thermochronologic analyses of rocks exposed at the eastern plateau margin record periods of mountain growth early in the Indo-Asian collision, implying that crustal flow alone could not have created the high topography.
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Articles
Slip maxima at fault junctions and rupturing of barriers during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake -
Zheng-Kang Shen, Jianbao Sun, Peizhen Zhang, Yongge Wan, Min Wang, Roland Bürgmann, Yuehua Zeng, Weijun Gan, Hua Liao & Qingliang Wang
doi:10.1038/ngeo636
The devastating Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 struck along a fault zone that showed low rates of deformation. Analysis of GPS and InSAR data suggests that, as structural barriers failed during a single earthquake, the rupture cascaded across multiple fault segments, which may explain the high magnitude of the event.
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Rupture of deep faults in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and uplift of the Longmen Shan -
Wang Qi, Qiao Xuejun, Lan Qigui, Jeffrey Freymueller, Yang Shaomin, Xu Caijun, Yang Yonglin, You Xinzhao, Tan Kai & Chen Gang
doi:10.1038/ngeo1210
The Longmen Shan Mountains rise up 6,000m over a distance of just 100km, but the mechanisms driving formation of this striking topography are debated. Analyses of crustal movements during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake suggest that fault-induced uplift plays a role in building the high topography.
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