July 28, 1976, is a dark day for all residents of Tangshan. In just a few seconds, a massive earthquake reduced this city of over a million people to rubble, with more than 650,000 buildings collapsing and 240,000 lives lost in their sleep, along with over 160,000 injuries.
Li Tailai, a senior lecturer at Nanjing University of Geology, shared astonishing discoveries from his investigations after the Tangshan earthquake.
Li Tailai's nephew and niece tragically lost their lives in the earthquake. Working at Nanjing University at the time, he immediately took leave to travel by train to Tangshan, eager to understand the geological phenomena behind the disaster.
His brother, also a geologist, shared his curiosity. Together, they took their cameras and began a week-long investigation in Tangshan. They uncovered many strange phenomena that traditional seismology could not explain.
Despite the earthquake's intensity measuring 11 on the Richter scale, almost all buildings in Tangshan were destroyed, yet some structures remained intact.
Phenomenon 1: All trees and utility poles stood upright and were unharmed. For instance, a 65-meter-high microwave transmission tower remained standing amidst the ruins, and it continued to transmit television signals accurately between two towers after the quake.
Phenomenon 2: The civil defense tunnels in Tangshan suffered only minor cracks and were largely undamaged.
Phenomenon 3: Among the casualties, no one died directly from the shaking; the vast majority perished due to building collapses.
Phenomenon 4: Except for a few areas affected by subsidence or other factors, most of the ground and roads remained intact, showing little to no wave-like undulation.
Phenomenon 5: In a three-story warehouse at the Tangshan Qixin Cement Plant, the first and second floors were mostly intact, while all the window columns on the third floor were broken, each with different angles of rotation, with one column twisted as much as 40 degrees.
Phenomenon 6: The overall structural damage to buildings, especially brick and cement structures, showed very few instances of complete tilting.
Phenomenon 7: At the Tangshan Public Security School, three identical three-story buildings were spaced 10 meters apart. During the quake, one building completely collapsed, while another only partially fell, and damage varied significantly between floors in the same building. Why was the impact so uneven in the same area?
These phenomena left Li Tailai questioning traditional seismology and sparked his curiosity further. Upon returning to Nanjing, he made two additional trips to Tangshan and began collecting relevant data seriously.
Previous theories in seismology categorized seismic waves into primary and secondary waves, attributing most destruction to secondary waves. However, Li Tailai found that these theories could not explain the various phenomena observed at the Tangshan earthquake site.
His research progressed significantly, but his conclusions have yet to gain unanimous acceptance in the field of seismology.
