Opinion: Shaken Ground, Unshaken Spirit- Tibet’s Sacred Response and Resilience

By Karma T. Ngodup

When the ground shook Tibet to its core, it exposed not just the fragility of earth, but the unshakeable spirit of its people. As tremors tore through the ancient plateau, they did more than shatter buildings and split roads—they revealed the profound resilience woven into Tibet’s cultural fabric. From the devastation emerged not just stories of loss, but a powerful testament to community that challenged every preconception about modern Tibetan society.

Social media brought vivid glimpses of these responses to the world: at midnight, streams of headlights illuminated the winding mountain passes as a young Tibetan woman with her drivers navigated perilous roads with unwavering determination. Their bloodshot eyes stayed fixed on the path ahead, even as their phones buzzed incessantly with updates about which villages needed aid. Many hadn’t slept for days, their faces lit by dashboard lights as they coordinated tirelessly, with the sheer sense of Tibetaness, that’s the call from within.

In and around Lhasa, donation points sprang to life. Volunteers worked tirelessly to sort through mountains of winter coats, boots, blankets, and tents. Every available vehicle transformed into a makeshift relief truck—luxury SUVs and ancient tractors alike. A convoy of trucks, their cargo beds heaped with aid supplies, stretched along the highway in an unbroken chain of solidarity.

Young volunteers, including students, artists, braved subzero temperatures to load and unload supplies. Trucks adorned with fluttering prayer flags climbed higher into the mountains, carrying more than just material aid, a song of solidarity. They bore the collective hope, resilience, and unity of an entire community determined to rise together in the face of tragedy.

The Earthquake and The Damming of the Mighty River

In a chilling twist of fate, mere days after Beijing greenlit the controversial Medog hydropower dam project—slated to become the world’s largest dam in an earthquake-prone zone—the earth itself seemed to protest. A massive earthquake ripped through the region, unleashing devastation that would haunt the area for years to come. As tremors tore through the landscape, confusion reigned: While the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported it as a 7.1-magnitude tremor, Chinese authorities classified it as a 6.8-magnitude. However, beyond these numerical discrepancies lies a more pressing human tragedy, where 126 lives were lost and hundreds more bearing physical and emotional scars, and entire communities left to rebuild their shattered world from the ground up.

The Tibetan Plateau, often called the “Roof of the World,” stands as one of Earth’s most remarkable geological features and a testament to the power of tectonic forces. Its seismic activity, tells a story millions of years in the making, shaping not only the land but also the lives of those who call this elevated paradise home, the Tibetan people. At the heart of Tibet plateau, lies a grand geological collision that began approximately 50 million years ago. The Indian tectonic plate, moving northward with the persistence of time itself, continues its steady march into the Eurasian plate at roughly five centimeters per year. This ongoing collision has created the world’s highest plateau and the towering Himalayan mountains and continues to shape the region’s destiny through frequent earthquakes and ongoing geological deformation. The earthquake serves as a somber reminder that when we ignore the delicate balance between development and preservation, the consequences can be devastating. (Above clip is with the approval from Prof. Christopher Scotese, an American geologist and palaeogeographer, retired professor here at Chicago).

Scientists studying Tibet’s complex geology have identified several critical processes shaping the region’s seismic activity. At the deepest levels, a phenomenon known as channel flow occurs where high temperatures and pressures create a layer of partially molten rock that behaves like a viscous fluid, flowing slowly beneath the plateau at depths of 15-50 kilometers. This molten rock movement contributes to the plateau’s ongoing deformation and uplift. Simultaneously, a more dramatic process called delamination is taking place, where the Indian Plate, as it slides beneath the Eurasian Plate, begins to peel apart like layers of an onion. The denser lower layer detaches and sinks into the mantle, while the more buoyant upper layer remains closer to the surface, fundamentally altering the region’s crustal structure. This process is further complicated by the plateau’s unique crustal characteristics – its crust is unusually thin for such high elevation, making it hypersensitive to tectonic forces. The combination of thin crust and extreme elevation creates a geological environment where even minor stress changes can trigger significant earth-shaking events, as the reduced crustal thickness provides less resistance to deformation and movement along fault lines. For example: For example, In the article titled– Tectonic plate under Tibet may be splitting in two, the Cona-Sangri rift system manifests as a significant north-south trending geological structure in southern Tibet, representing a surface expression of deeper lithospheric processes. This rift system appears to be directly linked to a tear developing in the subducting Indian plate beneath Tibet. Klemperer (2018).

The Tarim Basin, a vast desert expanse in the northwest China, is a geological depression, bounded by the Tibetan Plateau to the south, and serves as a natural laboratory for seismic monitoring. However, scientists face significant challenges in obtaining precise GPS measurements along its fault lines. The difficulties stem from three main factors: the basin’s unique geological structure, which distorts signal transmission; atmospheric interference caused by extreme temperature variations in the desert environment; and technical limitations of GPS equipment in such harsh conditions. According to recent research by Zhang et al. (2019), the convergent plate boundaries here show variable behavior – sometimes advancing, other times retreating. Despite these obstacles, monitoring stations in the Tarim Basin detected subtle but significant ground deformation patterns weeks before the earthquake, demonstrating the region’s value as an early warning system for tectonic events affecting Tibet. The construction of massive dams and extensive mining operations across Tibet’s sensitive geological landscape has increasingly been linked to earthquake and landslides activity. This relationship becomes particularly concerning given Tibet’s location atop active fault systems and its ongoing tectonic uplift.

The region’s geothermal systems, characterized by extensive hot springs and geysers, often show notable changes before seismic events. For instance, local observations have documented variations in spring water temperature and gas compositions, particularly in areas like the Yangbajing geothermal field near Lhasa. The high elevation and thin crust of Tibet make these geothermal features particularly sensitive to tectonic stress changes. As I remember discussing this issue with Stanford geophysics Professor Simon Klemperer for RFA in 2022. He has spent the better part of a decade traveling to Tibet and India to collect samples to support his theory that chemicals bubbling to the surface could be used to understand what’s happening 50 miles below. Land deformation across the plateau is especially pronounced due to the ongoing mega projects.

How Human Development Amplifies Tibet’s Seismic Risks

The Earth trembled in Tibet, but perhaps it wasn’t just nature’s unpredictable fury. While ancient wisdom taught reverence for these sacred peaks and valleys, modern ambitions carved deep wounds into the landscape. Massive dam projects have reshaped these sacred river systems that flowed undisturbed for millennia. Mining operations bore into mountains considered sacred by local communities, extracting minerals while leaving spiritual and ecological scars. Despite initial denials, Chinese officials were eventually compelled to acknowledge that five out of fourteen inspected dams had sustained damage, including concerning structural issues such as cracks. Three of these damaged dams required complete drainage, while a particularly severe case in Dingri county, near the earthquake’s epicenter, exhibited tilting walls that necessitated the emergency evacuation of approximately 1,500 residents from six downstream villages.

The intersection of human ambition and geological fragility in Tibet has created a concerning pattern of increased earthquake activity linked directly to major infrastructure projects.

The Xiaowan Dam on the Mekong River stands as a prime example of this troubling relationship – since its completion in 2010, local seismic monitors have recorded a marked increase in earth tremors, suggesting that the immense weight of its reservoir is stressing underlying fault systems.

The Gyama Mine near Lhasa tells a similar cautionary tale, where extensive deep tunneling and routine blasting operations have triggered a series of small but significant earthquakes, raising concerns about the cumulative impact of mining activities on regional stability. These effects become even more pronounced in the

Three Rivers region shows compound effects of reservoir loading and mining activities creating a complex web of geological stress – here, the weight of reservoir waters from dams interacts with the structural weakening caused by mining operations, creating a potentially dangerous feedback loop.

The Yamdrok Lake pumped storage project adds another dimension to this story, as scientists have observed a clear correlation between its water pumping operations and local seismic events, demonstrating how even seemingly routine human activities can disturb the delicate balance of tectonic forces beneath Tibet’s surface.

The Koyna Dam in India stands as a stark example, where reservoir loading triggered a devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake in 1967, demonstrating how human-made structures can awaken dormant geological forces.

The Zangmu Dam, situated on the seismically active Tibetan Plateau, is vulnerable to earthquake risks due to its location near the Indo-Eurasian tectonic plate boundary, one of the most earthquake-prone regions globally.

More recent events, such as the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, have brought the region’s seismic vulnerability into sharp focus. With a magnitude of 7.9, this disaster claimed over 87,000 lives and led to significant changes in how the region approaches earthquake safety.

The 2015 Nepal Earthquake, while centered outside Tibet, affected the southern regions of the plateau and triggered avalanches on Mount Everest, highlighting the interconnected nature of seismic events in the greater Himalayan region.

The cumulative impact of multiple dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo, including the proposed Medog Dam – planned to be the world’s largest hydropower project – significantly amplifies geological and hydrological stress in this fragile environment. Combined with climate change risks like glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), these developments threaten downstream regions through reservoir-induced seismicity. As the dam’s reservoir fills with billions of cubic meters of water, it creates enormous pressure on the underlying rock formations, particularly critical in the steep gorges where water weight can deeply penetrate the Earth’s crust. At its famous Great Bend, the river makes a dramatic U-turn around Namcha Barwa mountain, defying the typical west-to-east flow pattern of China’s major waterways. As Philip Ball notes in Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China, this deviation characterizes it as a ‘rogue river’ – one that China now seeks to “discipline” through this mega-dam project. The river’s path through the world’s deepest gorge intersects with several major fault systems, including the active Jiali-Parlung Fault Zone in the Eastern Himalayan Syntaxis, making any major infrastructure project here particularly concerning from a seismic perspective.

The integration of fault systems with regional tectonics adds significant complexity, particularly in areas marked by active plate boundaries and major fault zones. In the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian plates, where numerous hot springs and geothermal features dot the landscape, the additional stresses from reservoir impoundment can interact dangerously with natural tectonic forces. The plateau’s extensive network of active faults, especially along the Kunlun and Altyn Tagh fault systems, frequently exhibits pre-seismic indicators, and when combined with the added stress from reservoir loading, this interaction can potentially trigger larger earth-shaking events by destabilizing already stressed fault systems.

The reckless exploitation of Tibet’s pristine landscapes—its rivers, mountains, and sacred traditions—threatens not only the ecological balance of the plateau but the lifeline of billions downstream. As the Tibetan Plateau, the “Third Pole,” faces rising seismic and environmental pressures, its fate serves as a stark warning. The tremors we witness—literal and metaphorical—remind us that this fragile land cannot sustain unchecked ambition. Either we honor and protect this delicate ecological balance, or we risk turning the “Roof of the World” into yet another cautionary tale of human suffering and irreversible loss.

(Views expressed are his own)

The author is a coordinator of Tibetan National Sports Association in North America.

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