Magnitude 6.0 YUNNAN, CHINA
2003 July 21 15:16:31 UTC
Preliminary Earthquake Report
U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center
World Data Center for Seismology, Denver
Magnitude | 6.0 | ||
Date-Time |
Monday, July 21, 2003 at 15:16:31 (UTC) - Coordinated Universal Time Monday, July 21, 2003 at 11:16:31 PM local time at epicenter Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones |
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Location | 25.96N 101.32E | ||
Depth | 10.0 kilometers | ||
Region | YUNNAN, CHINA | ||
Reference |
75 km (50 miles) SSW of Panzhihua (Dukou), Sichuan, China 135 km (85 miles) ENE of Dali, Yunnan, China 650 km (405 miles) SW of Chongqing, Chongqing, China 2085 km (1300 miles) SW of BEIJING, Beijing, China |
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Location Quality | Error estimate: horizontal +/- 6.9 km; depth fixed by location program | ||
Location Quality Parameters |
Nst=136, Nph=137, Dmin=865.6 km, Rmss=0.93 sec, Erho=6.9 km, Erzz=0 km, Gp=59.8 degrees | ||
Source | USGS NEIC (WDCS-D) | ||
Remarks | At least 16 people killed, 584 injured, 24,000 houses collapsed, 1,186,000 houses damaged in Dayao and adjoining counties. At least 1,508 head of livestock killed. Rockslides blocked some highways in the epicentral area. Felt in much of southwestern Yunnan Province. |
Tectonic Summary
The July 21 earthquake occurred as the result of strike-slip faulting. Southwestern China is traversed by several major, seismically active, strike-slip faults, and many destructive earthquakes have occurred on lesser strike-slip faults. The epicenter of the July 21 earthquake is about 100 km north-northeast of the large Red River fault and about 100 km west of the large Anninghe fault. The causative fault of the July 21 earthquake has not yet been identified. In a broad sense, strike-slip faults and earthquakes in southwestern China result from the eastward motion of the Earth's crust that is driven by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian continental plates beneath the Himalaya Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau farther to the west.
centered within 300 km of the July 21, 2003 earthquake
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NB:
The region name is an automatically generated name
from the Flinn-Engdahl (F-E) seismic and geographical regionalization scheme.
The boundaries of
these regions are defined at one-degree intervals and therefore differ from
irregular political boundaries.
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