Rocks tell story of China's great flood

[nitpicker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36966274

Rocks tell story of China's great flood

By Jonathan Webb
Science reporter, BBC News

4 August 2016

Geologists have found evidence for an ancient megaflood which they say is a good match for the mythical deluge at the dawn of China's first dynasty.
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Previously, no scientific evidence had been found for a corresponding flood. But now a Chinese-led team has placed just such an event at about 1,900BC. Writing in Science Magazine, the researchers describe a cataclysmic event in which a huge dam, dumped across the Jishi Gorge by a landslide, blocked the Yellow River for six to nine months. When the dam burst, up to 16 cubic kilometres of water inundated the lowlands downstream.

The evidence for this sequence of events comes from sediments left by the dammed lake, high up the sides of Jishi Gorge, as well as deposits left kilometres downstream by the subsequent flood.

Lead author Dr Wu Qinglong, from Nanjing Normal University, said he and colleagues stumbled on sediments from the ancient dam during fieldwork in 2007. "It inspired us to connect the next possible outburst flood with the abandonment of the prehistoric Lajia site 25km downstream," he told journalists in a teleconference. "But at that time we had no idea what the evidence of a catastrophic outburst flood should be."

The Lajia site, famously home to the world's oldest noodles, is known as China's Pompeii; its cave dwellings and many cultural artefacts were buried by a major earthquake.
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He and his colleagues suggest in their paper that the very same earthquake that destroyed the Lajia dwellings probably dammed the river upstream. Less than a year later, the waters returned with a vengeance.
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