The station is expected to be built on the Great Bend, a horseshoe-shaped section of the world’s deepest land canyon, known as the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet. Located on the Tibetan Plateau just north of the border between China and India, the canyon is three times deeper and 37 miles longer than the U.S. Grand Canyon. It was formed by tectonic interactions between the Indian and Eurasian plates, but these interactions and climate change now threaten the existence of a hydropower project on the river.
China authorizes controversial hydropower project in landslide-prone region of Tibet
I was sickened to hear this. The area is one of most biodiverse and beautiful places on earth. Turning it into a high risk gamble seems crazy. The area is earthquake and disaster prone. A breached dam there would be one of the greatest disasters ever.
China tree posts. These two posts give a feel for the area.
They may use a tunnel vs a high dam.
This entire area was moving recently. This is that whole orogeny from Myanmar back to Iran. The violent collisions is what builds up the mountains. It slowly creates pressure on the faults and then the energy gets released all at once. Plus we have the splitting of the India Plate. You have the ocean plate under Iran that’s collapsing so a lot of geological changes going on in this entire area and I expect this to continue for a long time. It’s not if these countries get hit, it’s when. It’s been since the last cycle in the 1700s to 1900s since a lot of these countries got hit. So this area is due for big ones. I put a list out before of all these countries which were hit in the last cycle. Some are 80 to 100 years. Some are longer.
Timely news after I prepared the dam post with the 7.7 earthquake in the region. A dam there is a powder keg.