China’s geography, topography, climate,

geology, and natural hazards

(summarized by W. G. Ernst from images provided by

Steve Graham, Dave Howell and Tanya Atwater)

Topography, lakes andTopography, lakes and

inland seas of Asia (NASA)inland seas of Asia (NASA)

Taklamakan

Desert

Tibetan

Plateau

IndiaChin

a

Himalayas

Southern Tibet

Taklamakan Desert(Uygur meaning: If you go in, you won’t come out!)

Silk Route skirted the

Taklamakan Desert

Bad dust day in the Gobi and

Taklamakan deserts (also the Sahara!)

Westerly winds transport Chinese dust and industrial

aerosols + gases (e.g., Hg, SO2, CO2) eastward

Easterly (trade) winds transport Saharan dust westward

Day 1

Day 2

Day 5

Day 7

Humid, populous eastern lowland, and

arid, “deserted” central, western China

(Stanford geologic basin

studies = red dots)

Tibet

Mongolia

Xinjiang

Three Gorges Dam,Yangtze River

Precipitation

Kuroshio

Current

Indian Ocean

Monsoon

Agricultural regions

Population density: 1.0 billion

more people than the U. S.

Why is China so topographically diverse? Plate tectonics!

Active plate boundaries are marked by earthquakes

Lithospheric plates

China

Indian subcontinent is transported on oceanic

plate sinking beneath southern Asia

(looking west)

India acting as a

crustal indenter

Present-day indentation and extrusion of China

(Meade,

2007)

(GPS data)

(220 million years ago)

South

North

Accreted,

sutured

crustal blocks

constitute

today’s China

Natural hazards

Volcanism,

landslides,

earthquakes

tsunamis,

tropical storms

Active volcanoes, earthquakes, and the plate

tectonics of eastern Asia

1975 Haicheng

earthquake

epicenter

(The M7.6 Tangshan

event in 1976 killed

244,000 people)

Tsunami along

China’s south

coast, 2002

Diverse landscapes (thus climate, food

production, demography, natural hazards)

of China are chiefly a reflection of plate-

tectonics: collision + accretion of crustal

blocks over past ~300 million years.