Tangjiashan Lake
People's Republic of China · Asia
About
Tangjiashan Lake (Chinese: 唐家山堰塞湖, literally "Tang's Mountain landslide dam-created lake") is a landslide dam-created lake on the Jian River, which was formed by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Its name comes from the nearby mountain Tangjiashan. On May 24, 2008, the water level rose by 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) in a single day, reaching a depth of 23 metres (75 ft), just 29 metres (95 ft) below the barrier level. On June 9, 2008, more than 250,000 people had been evacuated from Mianyang in anticipation of the Tangjiashan Lake dam bursting.
A similar lake in the same province formed 222 years earlier caused one of the worst landslide-related disasters in history. On June 10, 1786, a landslide dam on Sichuan's Dadu River, created by an earthquake ten days earlier, burst and caused a flood that extended 1400 km downstream and killed 100,000 people.
A "relatively strong" aftershock on June 8, 2008, shook the massive earthquake-formed lake that has been threatening to flood more than 1 million people and triggered landslides in surrounding mountains. Soldiers used digging equipment, explosives, and even missiles to blast channels in the dam in an attempt to relieve the pressure behind it.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.