The provincial earthquake administration said Thursday that a total of 2,003 earthquake monitoring stations will be installed in Southwest China's Sichuan province by the end of 2020 to provide warning seconds before the seismic waves arrive.
The earthquake's seismic strength will also be tracked several minutes after the tremor to help local officials find the affected areas and take action to respond to rescue.
Upon completion of all the control stations, warnings will be sent around five to 15 seconds before the seismic waves arrive, said Su Jinrong, the province's earthquake monitoring center engineer.
With a total investment of 230 million yuan ($32.8 million) in July last year, the province began building these monitoring stations to collect and distribute real-time earthquake information, develop the disaster monitoring capabilities of the province, and advance scientific research on earthquakes and other natural calamities.
Early Warning System
According to Su, they also plan to make the warnings accessible through the radio broadcasting networks to all villages to remind the people to take self-rescue steps when an earthquake first occurs.
Studies on earthquake have found that being conscious of a three-second earthquake can save 14 percent of casualties, 10 seconds can save 39 percent of casualties, and 20 seconds can save 63 percent of casualties.
Similarly, Chinese scientists have set up a sophisticated monitoring infrastructure to track and predict natural disasters, such as ice avalanches and floods from glacial lakes on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, whose meltwater feeds 10 major Asian rivers and affects 1.9 billion people, scientists said on Wednesday.
The plateau is a freshwater system based on glaciers that provides water to downstream communities by storing or transporting vast quantities of water from their high-altitude snow packs, lakes and streams.
Disaster Preparedness
According to a global study published in the Journal Nature on Dec. 9, of the 78 global water towers surveyed, the Indus water tower, made up of vast areas of the Himalayan mountain range and covering parts of Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan, is the highest and one of the most affected by climate change.
The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is experiencing increasingly strong glacial retreats, resulting in melting and ice avalanches that could potentially block rivers and limit downstream water flow, said Yao Tandong, a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Climate change has had a sluggish but profound impact on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. According to a study, the plateau's glacier coverage has dropped over the past five decades from 53,000 square kilometers to 45,000 sq km.
