Earthquake News.

The death toll from the China earthquake, which was 7.9 on the Richter scale, has now topped 10,000, the worst death toll in that country from a quake in three decades. This is even stronger than the 1976 quake in Tangshan, which officially had a death toll of over 200,000 people (though some death toll estimates were triple that).

I am sure there will be far more fatalities than this:

The destruction of a single steam turbine factory in the city of Mianzhu buried “several thousand” people, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday morning.

The quake was already China’s biggest natural disaster since another earthquake leveled the city of Tangshan in eastern China in 1976, leaving 240,000 people dead and posing a severe challenge to the ruling Communist Party, which initially tried to cover up the catastrophe.

So what caused this massive earthquake? Blame it on India, which was once a giant island, moving in the direction of China. That is how the Himalayas came about.

A video report is here.

Here is another:



Brian Williams does a good job of showing just how powerful this quake was.

This interview explains why this quake is so devastating:



China has made great improvements since the last devastating earthquake in 1976, but it is still hard to predict the casualties from this latest disaster.

Here is a list of nine killer quakes. Included are the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the 1970 Peruvian earthquake, which caused a massive avalanche which totally destroyed the town of Yungay (I have written about this in an earlier post).