600 miles isn’t all that far when it comes to plate tectonics, is it? I think I’m probably looking at it a little childishly. The cause and effect—the water weight pressing down on one part of the plate, causing another end to shift and rise—it seems plausible, in a five-year old kind of way. That can’t be all there is to it. If it were, the dam would never have been built in the first place, right? I’m either stupid or naive today.
I’ve heard that theory as well... that large reservoirs behind dams can cause earthquakes in nearby faults. I have no idea. It’s one of those things that sounds plausible.
I’m not a geologist and didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn, but I think it’s also likely that while a large lake ~seems~ like a lot of weight, it is still very, very small in comparison to the mass of the tectonic plate it sits on. The plate is miles thick and of course thousands of square miles in area. Lots of mass there.
A lake that averages... what... a hundred feet deep? That’s like a coffee cup on the deck of a battleship. Sure it might be the last little bit that makes it tip... but it had to be pretty close already, I’m thinkin’.
And then again, I could be wrong. Happens all the time. Maybe a geologist will show up and help.
The activist group International Rivers Network was involved in a campaign in 2001 and 2002 to protest funding for the Zipingpu Dam because of its proximity to a fault line, said Aviva Imhoff, the group’s campaigns director.
Imhoff said the group obtained transcripts of a 2000 internal government meeting in which seismologists warned officials of the dangers of constructing the dam and the potential for it to be damaged in an earthquake, Imhoff said.
The massive Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest, is about 350 miles east of the epicenter.