June 2, 2008
Like many newspapers today, Beijing Daily Messenger leads with a headline concerning the search to find a rescue helicopter that crashed Saturday afternoon.
More than 4,000 people have spread out in the mountainous area near Yingxiu in an effort to locate the crash site and rescue the five crew members and nineteen evacuees aboard. The subhead notes that rough terrain and thick forests complicate the search.
The main photo shows one of two miners who were rescued yesterday, twenty days after they earthquake.
Most of the other major headlines are quake-related as well. Engineers working to dig a channel to solve the problem of the “quake lake” at Tangjiashan have left the area. The lake is expected to start draining on its own sometime tomorrow.
And the paper clears up yet another rumor about botched earthquake prediction by asking Wang Sichao, an expert from the Purple Mountain Astronomical Observatory in Nanjing, to explain why the moon has nothing to do with earthquakes:
The post circulating online claimed: “The Wenchuan earthquake occurred precisely at the first quarter of the moon (the eighth day of the fourth lunar month). On that day, the time of the first quarter was 11:47. On the day of a first quarter moon, gravity acts on the Earth from two different directions, and this gravity can create an unusual or resonant effect in certain plates in the Earth’s crust.” The post also said that other earthquakes throughout history had occurred at times when the moon was in its first or last quarter.
…
Wang Sichao explained that out of the sixteen most significant earthquakes in the world over the past two decades, five had occurred within two days of the moon’s first and last quarters, while eight had occurred within two days of the new and full moon. Three had taken place at other times during the month, including the major earthquake that hit Taiwan on 21 September, 1999 (the 12th day of the lunar month). So this does not support the idea that there’s a relationship between the quarters of the moon and earthquakes.
For other rumors, see The Dream And Reality Of Earthquake Prediction at ESWN.