A mountain-building fault let go beneath Sichuan. The rupture raised the terrain by metres and dammed rivers with landslides, forming new lakes that troops had to drain through a channel blasted and dug by hand.
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DownloadThe 2008 Wenchuan earthquake struck on May 12, 2008, registering magnitude 7.9 (estimated magnitude). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 708× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 31.00°N, 103.32°E, at a depth of about 19 km — a shallow crustal earthquake. Shallow earthquakes like this release their energy close to the surface, which is why the shaking near the epicenter was so violent.
An estimated 87,652 people were killed.