当然一个地质专业的本科生都不应该出这种小儿科错误。

下面是这篇报道的审稿人给嵇少丞的信。

Shaocheng：
I agree with your critical opinion on the reservoir-induced earthquake (RIS) article in Science. FYI, Richard Stone ask me to comment on the science article before it went to press. Below is my email comments, which was also send to Dr. Wen, one of the co-authors of the cited paper in Earthquake Geology.

While Science and Nature are the top journals, they do publish bad papers occasionally.

Hua-wei
From: Zhou, H
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 10:39 AM
To: Richard Stone
Cc: Zhou, H
Subject: RE: question

Dear Richard, Happy 2009!

I also attended the AGU session that included the talk by Christian D. Klose. I had high interest from reading his abstract so that I was looking for good evidences from his talk. Frankly I did not find his talk very convincing, though I'm open to learn more if he has more materials.

Most seismologists agree with the high level of stress accumulation in the region before the WenChuan quake, but I think few will agree that the region has “no major seismic activity during the Quaternary period”, according to Klose’s abstract. The clear lineament of the Longmenshan fault from satellite photo in such a region of a high-precipitation climate already reveals its seismically active nature. To demonstrate the triggering due to the filling of the Min River dam, one needs to at least do a realistic calculation of the loading as well as the stress change due to the new reservoir. Another and perhaps more difficult task is to rule out other potential triggering factors of similar or higher magnitudes. I think that Dr. Klose ought to present more detail evidences in a journal paper (such as JGR) that will offer more room for a vigorous analysis.

We may compare the faults in Sichuan with the main fault system in S California. If we took the Xianshuihe and Red River fault system as the San Andreas fault system, the Longmenshan fault would be the Garlock fault. So this is like a case that Garlock fault failed. In the same AGU session, I learnt an interesting result form a talk by Qiyuan Liu (who deployed 297 seismometers along the Tibet-Sichuan boundary) about a widely spread low-velocity zone (LVZ) in the middle to lower crust (below 18 km depth) in most areas north to the Longmenshan Fault. The existence of such a LVZ in middle-lower crust means that the brittle upper crust may be decoupled from the mantle, and the upper crust may act like a stress guide to bring the tectonic stress from the India-Eurasia plate collision to the Longmenshan fault region.

Sorry that I have not been following the triggering studies in China or elsewhere. You may ask Kerry Sieh (sieh@gps.caltech.edu) of Caltech who may follow such studies.

Take care,

Hua-wei