Intraplate earthquakes in North China - Intraplate Earthquakes - page 110

residential houses, and temple all collapsed.” Near the epicenter the damage was complete,
no building survived in a region of hundreds of square kilometers. The maximum intensity
reached XII. Liquefaction was widespread; one village with thousands of families sank
into the ground. The earthquake was followed by half a dozen large (M 6-7) aftershocks.
The earthquake also caused a breach in the banks of the Yellow River, flooding a large
area.
The Tancheng earthquake ruptured five segments of the Tanlu fault, with a total rupture
length of 130 km. The maximum coseismic horizontal slip was about 10 m and vertical slip
was about 3 m (Wang and Geng, 1996 ) .

1679 Sanhe earthquake (M 8.0)
The M 8 Sanhe earthquake occurred on September 2, 1679, 40 km northeast of Beijing. The
epicentral region includes the Sanhe and Pinggu counties, Hebei Province. The intensity
reached XI in these two counties.
The Annals of the Sanhe County described the event: “ ...the earthquake occurred
in the evening, with ground shaking from northwest to southeast. People couldn't stand on
the ground, which moved like a boat tossed in a stormy sea. Nearly all houses collapsed.
The ground cracked everywhere with black water swelling up for more than a month.” The
official death toll was more than 10,000 in Pinggu County, and 2,677 in Sanhe County. In
Beijing, 485 people were killed, many buildings, including palaces in the Forbidden City
and the city walls, cracked. The emperor Kangxi and the royal family stayed in tents as a
precaution.
The surface rupture was estimated to be about 56 km (Xu et al ., 2002b ) , and the average
coseismic vertical displacement was 1.4-3.16 m based on various drilling cores (Ran et al .,
1997 ; Jiang et al ., 2000 ) . The hosting fault is part of the complex Zhangjiakou-Penglai
fault system bounding the northern margin of the North China Block.

1695 Linfen earthquake (M 7.5-8.0)
OnMay 18, 1695, an M7.5-8.0 earthquake occurred in the Linfen basin in the southern part
of the Shanxi rift system (Wu et al ., 1988 ) . According to the Annals of Linfen County, the
earthquake occurred around 8:00 p.m. local time, with thundering sounds. In the epicentral
region, 70-80% of buildings collapsed. Damage was reported in 125 counties of Shanxi and
the neighboring provinces. The death toll varies among different records; it was

56,200 in
an official study conducted in 1875, while a Yuan Dynasty monument stated that 176,365
people lost their lives in this earthquake.
The epicenter of this earthquake is near that of the 1303 Hongdong earthquake, but on
a different fault. The Linfen earthquake ruptured along a northwest-trending fault that cut
the northeast-trending fault for the 1303 Hongdong earthquake. The rupture length of the
Linfen earthquake was about 70 km, with a high dip angle and sinistral slip (Cheng et al .,
1995 ; Hu et al ., 2002 ) .