Athens Center of Ekistics

FILL A LAKE, START AN EARTHQUAKE

Author(s): J. R. Rothé
Source: Ekistics, Vol. 26, No. 156, THE RATIONAL USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES FOR
HUMAN SETTLEMENTS (NOVEMBER 1968), pp. 432-435
Published by: Athens Center of Ekistics
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43617691
Accessed: 06-04-2019 16:46 UTC

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SYNTHESIS

FILL A LAKE, START AN J. R. Rothe

EARTHQUAKE
Professor Rothé, Secretary-General of the International
Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior, published the report from which this article is
abstracted in New Scientist , Vol. 39, No. 605, July 11,
1968.

There is now clear evidence that damaging earth- No earth tremor has been recorded from the area
quakes can result from the construction of dams. in the 15 years that preceded the construction of
The latest example of an earthquake that was the dam^ the first shock was felt in September,
severe enough to cause damage and whose occur- 1936, as the depth of water reached 100 m. During
rence is linked with the building of a lake-reservoir 1937, about 100 tremors were felt while the level
took place on 10 December, 1967, starting at 22.51 rose to some 400 feet, representing a load of 21
hrs. It was recorded on seismographs throughout thousand million tons. During 1938, seismographs
the world; it produced extensive damage through- were installed near the dam, and these recorded
out India; and it caused some 200 deaths in Koy- some thousands of tremors that were generally
nanagar - a town some 150 km SE of Bombay, imperceptible without instruments. The records
in the Ghats mountain. Our bureau, using the made it possible to localized the epicentres (Fi-
standard methods, located the epicentre at 17.4°N,gure 1).
73.9°E, a position extremely close to the large dam The severity of the seismic activity reached a
at Koyana (17° 23'N, 73° 45'E). Our figures are maximum in May, 1939, some nine to 10 months
approximately confirmed by those (17.3°N, 73.7°E) after the lake had reached its normal level of 475
issued by the Indian seismological office. feet. This corresponded to a load of about 35 thous-
In any year, there are some tens of thousands and million tons. The tensions accumulated in the
of earthquakes, but most of them are recorded as rocks in these months were released along faults
small. The severity of earthquakes is measured noted by geologists, the releases occurring after a
on a scale of magnitude proposed by Richter. The relatively small increase in the load. Once the
magnitude is defined as the logarithm of the max- reservoir had filled to its normal level, each burst
imum amplitude, measured in microns, recorded on of seismic activity, particularly marked in 1940,
a standard Wood-Anderson seismograph 100 km 1941, and 1942, followed a few weeks of overfilling.
from the epicentre of the disturbance. About 600 local tremors, spread over 8000 sq.
Studies have led to maps of the seismic zones km, were registered in 10 years from the time that
showing regions that can be considered to be ef- water was first admitted to the dam. Mainly, they
fectively free from tremors, and regions where the were feeble (magnitude 2 or less); on 4 May, 1939,
risk is sufficient to justify special precautions at the beginning of the period of increased activity
in the design of buildings. These maps make it mentioned above, only one shock reached magni-
quite clear that the construction of lake reservoirs tude 5; the two tremors of 11 August and 9 Sep-
has produced earthquakes in areas that have tember, 1942, were of approximately magnitude
been listed as free from tremors. 4 and followed a period in which the volume of
One example which has become a classic since water stored rose to 40 thousand million cu.m.
D.S. Carder's article was published in 1945 con- A more recent example concerns the Kariba
cerns the Boulder Dam in Colorado. Lake Mead, Dam, built in the gorges of the Zambesi on the
which was: formed by putting the Boulder Dam frontier separating Rhodesia and Zambia. Filling
across the Colorado River, started to fill in 1935. started in May, 1960, eventually forming the lar-

432

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 "An exceptionally long sequence of small local
shocks with an exponentially increasing frequency
preceded the principal shock. The sequence started
after the damming of the Acheloos River and the
impounding of the artificial Lake of Kremasta. It
was found that the numbers of the foreshocks could
be correlated with the increase of reservoir loading.
There seem, therefore, to be good reasons for be-
lieving that the tectonic equilibrium in the area
of Kremasta was sufficiently ripe to be disturbed
by this comparatively additional unilateral load.
The weight of the water in the new lake is of the
order of 4.7 x 109 tons. Many earth slides and
slump fractures were observed in the mezoseismal
area; 480 houses collapsed and about 1200 were
seriously damaged; slight damages were incurred
in 950 houses. One dead and 60 injured, four of
them seriously."
Eurytania lies in a seismically active region, but
in the period from 1951 to 1965 "the epicentres
always lay in the lower part of the Acheloos valley,
Fig. 1. Located epicentres in the lower Lake Mead region, some 40 km below the site of the dam. The dam
June, 1942, through December, 1944 (D. C. Carder). itself was built across the Acheloos near the ther-
mal springs at Kremasta, and filling started on
gest artificial lake in the world, with a volume of 21 July, 1965. The level of the lake rose rapidly
175 thousand million cu.m. The studies of the during November of that year, and tremors soon
tremors that followed the filling of this lakefollowed.
have The first were felt in January, 1966, and
not yet been published, but the development aof major
the tremor of magnitude 6.2, occurred on 5
February, when the lake was very nearly full
seismic activity can be followed in the monthly
(Figure 2) - the depth at this time was roughly
bulletins of the International Central Seismology
Bureau at Strasbourg. 120 m.
Tremors recorded by Rhodesian seismologistsA large number of tremors followed, centred
either to
ln January and February, 1962, could be shown near the lake or on the mountains to the
originate in Kariba; five days in March, 1962,
north west of the dam; five of them, on 5 February,
produced no less than 30 such shocks. The 8 March, 3 April, 4 May, and 11 June had magni-
seismic
activity increases steadily to reach a maximum tudes in
greater than 5. Figure 3 shows the epicentres.
September 1963. A severe tremor (magnitudeThe 5.7)lake is mainly based on sedimentary rocks,
was recorded at 06.40 hrs on 23 September, thefol-
flysch of the Eocene-Oligocene, but these rocks
lowed by tremors of magnitude 6.1 at 09.01 andhrs,
the Jurassic limestones of Gavrovon come into
5.6 at 15.02 hrs, and 5.8 at 22.23 hrs. There was aby means of faults some 11 km north of
contact
tremor of magnitude 5.5 at 09.12 hrs on the dam. The foreshocks and the main shock ori-
24 Sep-
tember, and one of magnitude 6 at 07.30 ginate hrs onat this zone.
the 25th. The epicentres lay between latitudes Papazachos and his colleagues, who made the
16.6° N and 16.8° N and longitudes 28.4°E and observations on which the map is based, have
28.8°E. Since this time, the seismic activity has stated, perhaps over-cautiously, that the artificial
declined, but the last bulletins of 1967 still men- lake was not the cause of the disaster of 5 February,
tion feeble tremors originating at Kariba. 1966. They consider that natural geological forces
It is important to note that the Kariba region had accumulated in the area for a long time, and
was regarded as having no seismic activity before that their release happened to coincide with the
the dam was built. Neither Gorshkov's work, moment when the dam was full. Indeed, they hold
published in 1963, nor any of the reports listed that the lake acted as a safety valve for these
above mention any tremors in the area. The tre- natural forces. This opinion, which contradicts the
mors recorded after the dam was built include the
thesis of the present article, is quoted to show that
the
first two "artificial" tremors to reach magnitude 6. problem of the origin of these earthquakes has
A similar connection can be demonstrated for
no simple answer, particularly in areas that show
natural seismic activity. A.G. Galanopoulos has,
the dams built at Kremasta and Marathon in
Greece. Oh 5 February, 1966, a few mildintremors
fact, shown that variations in the level of the
recorded in Eurytania (in Greece) were relatively
followed small artificial lake at Marathon have
by a severe shock (magnitude 6.3). The Greek
been followed by quite marked seismic activity.
seismological service stated: This must be natural activity, the disturbances

433

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 water. Relatively feeble tremors not more than 4
on the macroseismic scale, have been felt in the
neighbourhood ot the lake ever since 1962, when
it held only 850 million cu.m. of water. The epi-
centres that could be located were either under the
lake, some 40 km above the dam. The tremors were
accompanied by characteristic rumbles - sounds
that have been noted near other dams.
The volume of water contained by the dam
was raised until about by 1964, it reached 2000
million cu.m, and the volume has varied between
this and 850 million cu.m during each year since
then. The maximum depth of water attained was
100 m. A tremor rather stronger than the previous
ones was detected on 4 June, 1965, at a number of
Indian seismological stations, and the position of
the epicentre was calculated as latitude 14.6°N,
longitude 73.4°E. This is the position of the dam,
within the limits of experimental error. A paper
presented by P.M. Mane at the Ninth Congress
on Large Dams, at Istanbul in 1967, stated that the
tremors could be attributed to crustal adjustments
taking place in and around the lake due to the
large water load imposed (Fig. 4). He added that
Fig. 2. Diagram showing the pattern of filling of the "It is gathered that such tremors gradually de-
Kremasta Lake and the earthquake activity set up in crease over a period of some years and stop
the region of Kremasta (SS^+O^N, 21°51±0°51E) (A. completely. It is hoped that it will be so here also."
G, Galanopoulos).
This hope was unfulfilled. The earthquake that
occurred on 10 December, 1967, had a magnitude
of 6.4. It caused, as our opening paragraph men-
tioned, extensive damage, and was comparable
with the most severe of the tremors at Kariba.
It is important to remember that here, as at
Kariba, the earthquakes occurred in a region that
had no history of tremors before the dam was
built. Indeed, the map that accompanies the "In-
dian standard recommendations for earthquake
resistant structures" published in 1962, shows the
whole region of Bombay, Poona, and Koyna as
free from tremors.
It is by now clear that one can cite specific
cases where tremors, some of them severe enough
to produce extensive damage, are caused by the
construction of dams. When he builts these, Man
plays the role of the Sorcerer's Apprentice: in trying
to control the energy of the rivers, he brings about
stresses whose energy can be suddenly and disas-
Fig. 3. Index map of the location oi epicentres 01
trously
foreshocks and aftershocks in the region of .Kremasta released. The activity of these artificial
(B. Papazachos et al.) earthquakes becomes particularly clear once the
depth in the dam exceeds 100 m: it starts once
being triggered by the changes in water level. the dam is partially full, reaches a maximum,
The dam at Koyna, in India, is built in anandarea
then appears to die out after a few years. The
uniformly covered by the basalts of the Deccan tremors occur only under specific geological condi-
plateau. The basalt structures actually consist of concerning, for example, the sub-soil and
tions
alternate layers of compact basalt flows and the thin-existence of faults or slip-planes, and the
building of dams does not always produce earth
ner beds of ashes, tuffs, and breccias (a fragmented
rock). No clear faults are known, but theretremors.are A demonstration of this is the dam at
slip planes, where basalt overlies tuff. The Serre-Ponçon
dam in the French Alps. The artificial
itself has a height of 103 m, and the artificial lake
lake is almost entirely situated on the Black Soils
it encloses can hold about 2780 million cu.m. of of the Embruñáis, a flexible terrain in which

434

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stresses are unlikely to accumulate. Filling the
dam was not followed by any tremors.
The tremors produced by the filling of dams can
occur in both old and new rocks, and in areas
whose faults have been inactive for geologically
long periods. It follows that the building of a dam
should be preceded by an extremely careful geolo-
gical survey of the area of the lake, as well as that
of the dam.
The exact mechanism producing the major
artificial earthquakes is not understood, although
clearly, as with natural earthquakes, what is in-
volved is the release along lines of weakness of
energy stored in a limited volume of rock. While the
origin of the energy of natural tremors is unknown,
that of the artificial ones clearly derives from the
mass of the stored water. One can hope that the
study of artificial tremors may help towardsFig.
the4. Koyna Dam: General map of works and epicentres
prediction of earthquakes in general. of earth tremors (P. M. Mane) .

435

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