Earthquake/drought connection.
There was a terrible earthquake in the 1960’s in Nicaragua after a severe 7 month drought. At the time I thought that this might have been caused by the drying up of the water table, the land getting lighter, and springing upward along a fault. I call it the “bedspring effect”, kind of the mattress shaking when you have been sitting on the edge of the bed and then get up.
I was in a 7.5 in Mexico City in 1957. The city is underlaid with deep mud and the shaking was quiet and steady like standing up in a fast moving subway train. It was 1:30 in the morning coming home from a party. First I thought, “but I only had 2 drinks”, then my date, from California, yelled “earthquake”. We ran for the center of the intersection and held on to each other as the light poles swayed and the ground rocked for more than a minute. It killed almost 200 people. Many buildings that did not collapse had major structural cracks, and had to be torn down, so even if there are Chinese pictures that don’t look so bad, there may be serious irremediable damage.
Drought has showed before earthquake for several times in China history. But there is still not much research about this. “Bedspring effect” you mentioned is very interesting. Some earthquake scientists just use the statistic methodology to find the relationship, but I haven’t found any article to show how those drought related to earthquake. “Bedspring effect” maybe a good theory and it could be proved by the fact that earthquake would happen at the border of severe drought area.