刚刚收到《科学》杂志亚洲区编辑、驻中国记者石垒（Richard Stone）及其助手陈曦和郝炘在最新一期《科学》上发表的报道：

 

 

（标题翻译：滑坡、水灾造成威胁，而专家在调查地震影响）

 

石垒刚刚从成都回到北京，此报道是他在成都发的。在众多前往震区采访的外国记者中，他大概是不多的专门从科学的角度来报道这场灾害的一个，也比较集中地介绍了中国科学家正在震区开展的地震科研工作。其中也提到了科学家对地震前兆的不同看法。

 

但是，报道也提出，地震虽然难以预报，却并非不可以预防。“专家们正在质疑，更好的建筑，特别是校舍，是否可以防止很多死亡。‘地震本身并不杀人，’刘说（密苏里大学地球物理学家Mian Liu）。最大的杀手是建筑的倒塌。”因此，加强对灾害影响的分析和管理，提高建筑标准，特别是学校和医院等公共建筑的标准，应该势在必行。

 

现将原文贴出来。原文链接为：

 

 

 

CHENGDU, CHINA—Wei Fangqiang knows what it’s like when a mountain crumbles:The Longmenshan, or Dragon’s Gate Mountains, are prone to landslides. But when the physical geographer and seven colleagues with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment (IMHE) in Chengdu trekked into the area devastated by the Sichuan earthquake, they were stunned. It looked as though the hills had been blown apart. Landslides had flattened severalstory buildings in the town of Beichuan and annihilated villages that clung to the steep slopes. In Wenchuan, Wei and his comrades picked their way across a 70-meter-high, 300-meter-wide rubble pile that had crushed a hydropower station and blocked the Chaping River. If an aftershock had struck, it could have spawned a new landslide where they were walking. “It was very, very dangerous,” Wei says.

 

Landslides unleashed by the rupture of a more than 200-kilometer section of the Longmenshan fault, followed by powerful aftershocks, dammed parts of nine rivers, creating 24 new lakes. The biggest and most threatening is 3.5 kilometers upstream of Beichuan. If the debris dam were to break, the resulting flood would threaten relief workers and researchers in Beichuan. “We’re worried about another catastrophe,” says Wei. As Science went to press, experts with the Ministry of Water Conservation were weighing options for how to relieve pressure building up behind the dam. They had at most a week to act, said Cheng Genwei, IMHE’s vice director.

 

Down the road from IMHE, researchers with the Chengdu Institute of Biology (CIB) were in mourning. Three senior staff members died when the wall of a hostel in the mountains collapsed as they were dashing out of the door for safety. (IMHE lost one staffer in Beichuan.) After a 20 May memorial service, CIB scientists were hoping to return to work with an ambitious research agenda, including an examination of habitat fragmentation and ecological succession in landslide areas. “The earthquake will be a big driver for research,” says CIB ecologist Bao Weikai. He and colleagues will also be alert to a grave threat to Sichuan’s famed giant pandas: the possibility of a massive die-off of bamboo, the panda’s staple, like one recorded in a quake 30 years ago.

 

At 2:28 p.m. local time on 12 May, the Sichuan earthquake struck with a magnitude of 7.9. It “was not a total surprise to geophysicists,” says Mian Liu, a geophysicist at the University of Missouri, Columbia. It occurred on a well-known, active fault system, he notes, which in 1933 produced a magnitude-7.5 quake that killed about 9000 people.

 

But the death toll of the Sichuan earthquake is horrific. As of 20 May, more than 40,000 people are known to have perished, including thousands of children. Experts are asking whether better construction, especially at schools, could have prevented many deaths. “Earthquakes themselves do not kill people,” says Liu. The biggest killer, he says, is structural collapse—“a point so sadly illustrated by this earthquake.” It appears that many wrecked buildings were not reinforced. “One hardly sees steel beams extruding from the collapsed buildings,” Liu says. “When they are seen, they are so thin that they bent with the debris like overcooked noodles.”

 

Under a makeshift canopy next to a swimming pool at a community center in the hardhit historic town of Dujiangyan, west of the epicenter, geophysicist Miao Chong-Gang points to a map on his laptop overlain with seven circles in a line on the Longmenshan fault. It’s the latest data from China’s seismic monitoring network showing that the Sichuan earthquake was composed of seven powerful sequential ruptures unleashed when the fault ruptured southwest to northeast. “Several years ago, we could not do an analysis like this,” says Miao. But with more than 1000 seismometers now in a digital network, China can now parse data like this in a few hours.

 

Within 30 minutes after the quake hit, the China Earthquake Administration (CEA) in Beijing had crunched the numbers and issued a preliminary forecast of at least 7000 deaths. Their assessment would prove to be an underestimate, but it was alarming enough to prompt CEA to mount a full-scale response. Miao, vice-director of CEA’s Earthquake Emergency Management Department Response Command Center, led a 230-person team to Dujiangyan late in the evening on 12 May. His group, one of 187 rescue teams in the disaster area, has saved 48 people; in the morning of 19 May, they were elated to have saved a 61-year-old woman who had survived 163 hours in the rubble.

 

Miao’s team was about to switch from rescue to recovery. Among their tasks over the next 2 months, Miao says, is to groundtruth the computer-generated data. That will mean conducting seismic, strong-motion, and geologic surveys and running tests on everything from geomagnetism to water chemistry. Such research must wait until the aftershocks have subsided. Several CEA volunteers who were ferrying food and water on foot into the disaster zone were among more than 150 relief workers known to have died in aftershock-induced landslides. The slides also claimed the lives of two Sichuan Earthquake Administration researchers who were measuring crust deformation. “We have almost no experience in responding to an earthquake in a mountainous area,” says Miao.

 

Back in Chengdu, CIB scientists are itching to get out into the field. A week after the quake, 10 of their colleagues were alive but stranded at CIB’s Maoxian Mountain Ecosystem Research Station in a pine forest 220 kilometers northwest of Chengdu. The institute had a couple of dozen long-term projects in the disaster area, a biodiversity hot spot that encompasses 22 nature reserves. They’ll have to write a new research plan. “The earthquake has dramatically changed the landscape,” says CIB ecologist Luo Peng.

 

One urgent task is to monitor bamboo. The plant flowers once every 70 years or so. Shortly after a powerful earthquake in the 1970s, large swaths of bamboo suddenly flowered and died, says CIB ecologist Pan Kai-Wen. How a quake might trigger flowering is a mystery, but a large-scale die-off, he says, could pose a big threat to China’s endangered giant pandas.

 

To map the landslides, Wei and his IMHE colleagues ventured into the danger zone on 15 May. They had to abandon their car where a landslide had blocked the highway and head toward Beichuan on foot. Traveling in the other direction was a ragged stream of refugees. When the researchers reached Beichuan the next day, they found that although many buildings had collapsed from the shaking, many others were demolished by massive boulders. “In some places, the landslides did more damage than the earthquake,” Wei says. “We know the rock is very loose here. But still I was surprised that the landslides were so severe.” In a nearby village, a woman was on top of a pancaked building. “She was calling her son’s name, trying to wake him up.” There was no one else around.

 

Wei and his colleagues could not get past a blocked mountain pass leading to the biggest landslide, a 2-kilometer-long debris flow that had clogged the Qingjiang River. To ward off a catastrophic breach, Cheng says, the preferred option is to dig a canal that drains the lake gradually. If that’s impossible, he says, they’ll have to blast the dam and allow a more chaotic release. Sichuan’s rainy season starts in late June; if the rains start early, before the problem is dealt with, the situation could be very dangerous, says Wei.

 

The IMHE researchers plan to head into the field as early as next week to sample landslide material and draw topographic maps. A future task is to advise authorities on a safe place to rebuild Beichuan city. The original site will almost surely be abandoned. “It should be a memorial to the earthquake victims—and a reserve for seismic research,” says Miao. CIB scientists hope to turn the disaster into an opportunity to advise Longmenshan residents about more sustainable livelihoods in the fragile mountain

 

ecosystem. One practice they want to see ended is farming on the steep slopes. Better forest cover could reduce the landslide risk, says Luo: “We need a new strategy of mountain development.”

 

Others say the Sichuan disaster should stimulate China to rethink its entire approach to earthquake research. “In recent decades, geophysicists have spent too much energy and funding on research on deepearth structure or tectonics,” says Zhou Shiyong, a geophysicist at Beijing University. He argues that more attention should be devoted to earthquake prediction. “We could find some precursors,” he says, such as abnormal patterns in seismic stress or underwater variation before a huge quake occurs. Miao counters that any precursors of the Sichuan quake were minimal. “They could not have given us any warning,” he says.

 

One thing that will surely come under scrutiny is China’s construction standards. “More effort should be devoted to earthquake hazards analysis and management, including developing and enforcing proper building codes, especially for schools, hospitals, and other public buildings,” Liu says. For thousands of victims in Sichuan, that lesson came too late. –RICHARD STONE With reporting by Chen Xi and Hao Xin.