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Severe Cracks in China’s Zipingpu Dam
Posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 @ 1:30 am by Dave Schumaker
Severe cracks were discovered in the Zipingpu Dam, located in China’s Sichuan province. The cracks were discovered after Monday’s earthquake. According to Chinese authorities, the “plant and associated buildings have collapsed and some are partly sunk.” The dam is locaed upriver from Duijiangyan City, which has a population of 630,000 people.
About 2,000 troops were sent to work on a dam near the epicenter of Monday’s earthquake, state-run media reported.
The Zipingpu dam, upriver from Dujiangyan in Sichuan province, was in “great danger,” the Xinhua news agency reported.
China.org said that the 7.9-magnitude earthquake had caused “severe cracks” in the dam.
The “plant and associated buildings have collapsed and some are partly sunk,” it said of the hydropower station.
The Ministry of Water Resources said that an irrigation system and Dujiangyan City — which has a population of about 630,000 — “would be swamped,” if major problems emerged at the dam, China.org said.
More information also available at Sky News.
Update: The dam is now reported to be stable and safe.
Update 2: Updated to a correct photo of the Zipingpu Dam, as the Internation Rivers website had an incorrect photo.
Devil’s Pool at Victoria Falls - The Most Dangerous Place to Swim
Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 @ 12:28 pm by Dave Schumaker
This is only tangentially related to geology (rivers and waterfalls - you could even argue geomorphology), but I just stumbled across this article on the Huffington Post that was published last month.
The most dangerous place to swim in the world? It depends on how you might classify danger: shark attacks, piranhas, rip currents, jellyfish? How about being swept over a waterfall? At Victoria Falls, on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia - perhaps the largest waterfall in the world, visitors can swim in a pool that sits right on the brink of the waterfall, swimming right up to a ledge that drops nearly 360 feet below.
The pictures give me chills!
Source: The Daily Mail
More incredible pictures can be seen at The Daily Mail as well.
[Via Huffington Post and the Daily Mail]
Floodplain Development in the Midwest
Posted on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 @ 11:20 am by Dave Schumaker
Dr. Robert E. Criss, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, says that patterns from this winter’s storms are eerily similar to those that preceded the Great Flood of 1993 in the Midwest. The Great Flood of 1993 was responsible for $20 billion in economic losses and destroyed 50,000 homes.
Parallels this year include abnormally high levels of precipitation in late winter and early spring and early flooding in various regions, such as the floods of late March in Missouri, Arkansas and Illinois and the Ohio River watershed. An unknown factor is the effect of the snow melt – Wisconsin, for instance, had record amounts of snow this winter – on river systems this spring and summer.
Despite the similarity in conditions, and periods of flooding nearly every year after those flood years more than a decade ago, one thing Midwesterners have not learned is “geologic reality.”
Criss’ arguments come across as harsh, but he raises completely valid points against development in floodplains and the consequences of levee systems.
[Via Eurekalert]