(February 3, 2009) British newspaper Telegraph has joined an evergrowing list of international media outlets promoting the recent theory that last year’s devastating Sichuan earthquake was not an entirely ‘natural’ disaster. That it was potentially caused by the added pressure on the fault line as a result of the Zipingpu dam reservoir being constructed.

In an article published on February 3rd, Telegraph Shanghi correspondent Malcolm Moore described the theory, shared by scientists in both China and the United States, that the added weight of the reservoir’s 315 million tonnes of water affected the pressure on the fault line that ran directly underneath, potentially leading to a chain of siesmic ruptures that in turn caused the 7.9 magnitude quake.

In addition to quoting the two scientists who have provided the majority of the evidence supporting this theory, Fan Xiao of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau in Chengdu and Christian Klose of Columbia University in New York, Moore points out that the Chinese government has dismissed the possibility that any of their major building projects had to do with the deadly seismic event. Though at the same time, the Chinese government has also denied scientists access to crucial seismic data that could potentially confirm what is so far just a hypothesis.

Malcolm Moore, Probe International, February 3, 2009

read the original story here