Powerful Quake Hits Sichuan, China

A massive earthquake rocked southwest China on Monday, killing thousands of people and flattening schools and homes in a powerful tremor that was felt across a swathe of Southeast Asia. The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck close to densely populated areas of Sichuan province including the capital Chengdu.

The State Seismological Bureau located its epicentre in Wenchuan County, 93km from Chengdu, a mountainous region home to the Wolong Nature Reserve where China's leading research and breeding base for endangered giant pandas are located.

The powerful quake had really shake this earth up. It swayed many buildings & tremor can be felt in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Hanoi & Bangkok which is about 1500km to 1800km away from the epicentre. However, there were no immediate reports of damage there.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao called it a "Major Disaster" and urged an "All-Out" effort to rescue victims. More than 50,000 soldiers had been mobilised to help with disaster relief work.

The death toll from the huge earthquake climbed to nearly 12,000 on Tuesday as rescuers scrambled to reach thousands of people buried under debris. The quake toppled two primary schools in the vast city of Chongqing & 900 students were feared buried when a high school collapsed in Dujiangyan, northwest of Chengdu.

One of the biggest quakes ever recorded was in China in 1976, which killed 242,000 people. That quake, centred in the northern city of Tangshan, lasted for 15 seconds and flattened 90 percent of buildings. The death toll, out of a population of one million, made it one of the world's deadliest in the 20th century. In 1920 and again in 1927, separate quakes in northwestern China each left some 200,000 dead. The last powerful quake to hit China was on March 21, a 7.2 magnitude quake which struck near the northwestern city of Hotan in Xinjiang province.

The violent quake that shook China's Sichuan province on Monday is linked to a shift of the Tibetan plateau to the north and east. Earthquakes are frequent and deadly along the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau, which was raised when India collided into Eurasia, starting some 50 million years ago. It is this powerful thrust that created the Himalayas, towering at 8,848 metres with Mount Everest, the highest peak. The mountains continue to reach skyward to this day, propelled by unstable tectonic terrain.