Tibetan tectonics triggered China quake

The violent quake that shook China's Sichuan province today is linked to a shiftof the Tibetan plateau to the north and east, experts said.

"There will certainly be manyaftershocks," specialists at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics told AFP.

The quake, with a magnitude of7.8, struck close to densely-populated areas of Sichuan province and was feltacross a swathe of southeast Asia.

China's state-run Xinhua newsagency quoted local disaster relief officials as saying 3,000 to 5,000 peoplewere estimated to have died in just one district of Sichuan, Beichuan County.

Earthquakes are frequent anddeadly along the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau, which was raised when Indiacollided into Eurasia, starting some 50 million years ago.

It is this powerful thrustthat created the Himalayas, towering at 8,848 metres with Mount Everest, thehighest peak. The mountains continue to reach skyward to this day, propelled byunstable tectonic terrain.

"Tibet is being pushed to theeast. It is straddling southern China and locally the Sichuan basin," said PaulTapponnier, an expert on tectonics in the region that is prone to earthquakes.

The quake that emanated in theLongmenshan margins of the Tibetan plateau "has very complex geology," saidRobin Laccassin, director of the tectonics department at the Institute.

"There are many major faultlines... Some are ancient and they probably broke," saidLaccassin.
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