Several violent earthquakes that have hit western China have normally occurred before earthquakes and major flooding in eastern China, according to a seminar Wednesday.
Guo Zengjian, a seismologist with the Lanzhou Seismological Institute, said at the seminar that the connection is a useful reference for disaster prediction in eastern China.
He told the annual conference of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) which was held in Xi'an that he and other experts are attempting to determine the factors that triggered the earthquakes to forecast future earthquakes.
The seismically active belt in the west is geodynamically connected with east China, said Guo.
Guo listed several violent earthquakes that took place from 1842 to 1983 in western China, along with corresponding natural disasters that occurred shortly after in eastern China.
In January 1937, an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter Scale shook part of Qinghai at 35 degrees latitude north. Seven months later, two earthquakes measuring 7 and 6.7 on the Richter Scale hit Heze in east China's Shandong Province at the same latitude, he said.
Strangely enough, he said a quake measuring 6 on the Richter Scale took place in Qinghai at the same latitude on November 6, 1983. The very next day, Heze was hit by an earthquake measuring 5. 9 on the Richter Scale.
"We discovered that once earthquakes measuring above 7.0 on the Richter Scale occurred at the border of Mongolia, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province, the middle reaches of the Yellow River are prone to big flooding," Guo said.
For example, in June 1842, a quake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale occurred in northwest China's Xinjiang, the middle reaches of the Yellow River suffered devastating flooding, he said.
Catastrophic flooding appeared on the middle reaches of the Yellow River several months after an earthquake hit Gansu, Xinjiang and the border between southwestern Mongolia and
Xinjiang in 1932, 1957 and 1974, respectively.
He also found that floods in the Yangtze valleys always followed major quakes in south China's Yunnan or neighboring Myanmar, such as the big floods in 1931, 1954 and 1998.
He said western China should be taken into account when considering disaster prevention in eastern China.
(Xinhua)
