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00:00earthquake in Tingri, south of Tibet, which borders closely with Nepal and India.
00:08As of reports up to now, some 95 people have died because of this earthquake and some 130
00:17people have been injured so far and many houses have also been destroyed because of this earthquake.
00:24And everybody knows that the Tibetan plateau was formed because of the tectonic shift between
00:30the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate and Tibet is highly prone to earthquakes.
00:37This is one of the six major earthquakes that happened inside Tibet over the last one century.
00:44And that is why building of dams on Tibetan rivers, including the one that China announced
00:51recently in December about the dam in Methok at the Great Bend on the Tsangpo River or
01:00the Brahmaputra, which is also called Siang in India, this dam is supposed to produce
01:08three times higher electricity than the Three Gorges Dam, which is the biggest in the world,
01:13but is also based in China, might have serious consequences to the downstream countries including
01:23India and Bangladesh, so this earthquake is also a pointer to the fact that anything could
01:29happen on Tibetan plateau and major developmental activities like dams and infrastructure construction
01:39should take environmental impacts into consideration and mitigate future destructive nature of
01:49these constructions, so I think these two instances are different, separate, but also
01:58interlinked in the sense that the earthquake is a message to major developmental activities
02:04inside the Tibetan plateau.
02:05So what kind of situation is there right now?
02:10Right now we are still collecting information, it's very difficult to get information from
02:14inside Tibet, some pictures have come out, but every time an event happens, particularly
02:21political events, Chinese government always make sure that these reports don't go out
02:27of Tibet, so anybody who sends information out of Tibet is targeted by the Chinese authorities,
02:33so even in this case people will be careful in sending information out, but because of
02:40social media these days, since this is a non-political issue, hopefully news will be more available
02:50on the earthquake.