Characteristics of Earthquake Distribution in Kunlun Mountains and Designs of Qinghai-Tibet Railway Engineering

Abstract eng:
At 17:26, 14th, Nov. 2001, an earthquake of Richter magnitude 8.1 happened at N36.2° and E90.9° in the west of the Kunlun Mountain Pass, which was the heaviest one in terms of magnitude in the past 50 years in the mainland of China, caused by the Kunlun Mountains Pass Fault. The fault was a left-lateral strike-slip reversed fault with a dip direction of N80°W and dip angle of 50°～78°, which was 100~200m wide. A surface fracture zone about 426 km in length along the fault developed from east to west about 70km to the east and 350km to the west of the Qinghai-Tibet highway came into being. The fracture zone was consisted of a series of pure shearing strike-slip fractures with feather form. The maximum width of the fracture zone was 32m, the maximum horizontal displacement of the ground fissures was 6.4m and the maximum vertical displacement was 4m. Many bulges with several meters high on the discontinuous steps and fissures with tens of meters in depth were appeared. Basically the seismic intensity is Ⅷ in the region. The Qinghai-Tibet railway has been designed according to the aseismatic criterion of railway construction. The railway line was designed to cross the earthquake fault with large angle by embankment and culvert, without large structures such as bridge within 600m far from the fault. In this paper the distribution characteristics of the earthquake in Kunlun Mountains and the designing work of the Qinghai-Tibet railway engineering were presented, and the safety of the railway was evaluated.

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