beijingwalker
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Walk Around the Epicenter of 2008 Earthquake ~ Wenchuan China , the most powerful earthquake in the recorded history in China
Taking you around the epicenter of China's most devastating earthquake in recent history, Wenchuan, Sichuan, China. 13 years later the city has completely rebounded back to a beautiful place.
---------- About the 2008 Earthquake ----------
It is believed that 69,227 people died, 374,176 people were hurt, and 18,222 people listed as missing.(July 2008 numbers) The earthquake left about 4.8 million people homeless, though the number could be as high as 11 million. Approximately 15 million people lived in the affected area.
Measuring at 8.0 Ms, the earthquake lasted about two minutes. It was powerful because it did not happen very deep under the ground. Many people were killed because there were so many people living above the epicenter. Teruyuki Kato, a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, said that the shock waves traveled a long way. The waves did not lose their power because of the hardness of the ground in central China.
The quake happened because a part of the earth's surface, called the Indian plate, is slowly moving north. It is moving about 50 mm (2 in) every year. It crashes into the Eurasian plate. This has pushed up the ground and made the Himalaya mountains. Some of the earth's crust gets pushed into Sichuan and southern China. This pushing has caused many earthquakes in China. The epicentre was in the mountains on the eastern edge of the Qing-Tibet Plateau. This is on the north west edge of the Sichuan Basin. The earthquake was caused by movement on a north east fault. This is the Longmen Shan fault, that runs along the edge of the basin.
