Rescuers save an injured woman after an earthquake hit Baosheng Township in Lushan County, Ya'an City, in southwest China's Sichuan Province. (Photo : www.marketwatch.com)
A seismologist working for the China Earthquake Administration (CEA) has called for more research to develop a better and more accurate technology to monitor and predict earthquakes, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The Chinese seismologist made the call at the seventh commemoration of the Sichuan earthquake, which claimed more than 80,000 lives in Wenchuan County in 2008.
Zhang Xiaodong, deputy director of an earthquake forecast research institute under the CEA, said however that the process to develop the technology would require long, tedious work.
According to Zhang, the 7.5-magnitude quake that hit Nepal, followed by the 8.1-magnitude last month, is part of the period of seismic activity than began with the massive Sumatra earthquake in Dec. 2004. He said that after that, the world has been experiencing frequent earthquakes above the 8-magnitude, which it had not seen since the first half of the 20th century.
Since 2008, China had experienced one 8-magnitude quake and four 7-magnitude quakes, the report said.
CEA said that the government has set up more than 3,100 earthquake monitoring sites across the country and seismic observation networks covering more than 90 percent of the Chinese mainland.
The agency said that through this monitoring and observation network, the earthquakes that occur in two-thirds of the country can be reported within three minutes, and accurate data collected from it can be published within 30 minutes.
Aside from this, the country has also organized an emergency response system made up of a central command with local branches, earthquake rescue teams at the national and provincial levels, and stored supplies and relief goods.
