Sixteen members of the Blue Sky Rescue Team, a Chinese civil relief squad, set off from Ruili City in southwest China’s Yunnan Province on Saturday morning, heading to northern Myanmar’s earthquake zone to aid in relief operations..
The Blue Sky Rescue Team is China's largest non-governmental professional emergency rescue organization.
The team traveled in five vehicles and carried small-scale rescue equipment and medical supplies.
At the request of Myanmar government, the Chinese government has also sent a rescue team with 82 members to carry out humanitarian relief operations. The team flew from Beijing Capital Airport to Myanmar on Saturday.
A powerful 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck the Southeast Asian country on Friday. So far, over 1,000 people had been confirmed dead in the disaster.
More Chinese rescuers join efforts to aid quake-hit Myanmar
No scientific connection can be drawn between the spate of major earthquakes which have been recently observed around the globe, a seismologist said on Monday, while stressing that experts are still unable to make truly accurate predictions on when and where the next major quake will strike.
Public concerns have been raised in recent times following the occurrence of several large seismic events, with the 7.9-magnitude earthquake which struck Myanmar on Friday, resulting in over 2,700 fatalities and thousands of injuries, being followed by a 7.0-magnitude tremor in Tonga on Sunday.
Earlier this year, southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region was hit by a 6.8-magnitude quake which left 126 people dead, hundreds of others injured, and caused widespread damage.
Despite fears over the regularity of these disasters happening in relatively quick succession in the Asia-Pacific, Robert J. Geller, a seismologist and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, told the China Global Television Network (CGTN) that there is no evidence of any causal relationship between these seismic activities.
"The occurrence of large earthquakes is a kind of matter of probability rather than definite connections. Just like you have aftershocks right near the epicenter, you also have earthquakes that can be triggered at a long distance. So, there is some connection between all of the earthquakes in the Earth's crust. But it's not so simple as to say that earthquake A triggered earthquake B which triggered earthquake C. Any large earthquakes make some instability in the crust on a global scale, and it makes slightly more probability than normal for other large earthquakes," he said.
As it is still not yet possible for the scientific community to make precise forecasts on future earthquakes, Geller stressed the most effective approach to remaining resilient in the face of such natural disasters is through thorough preparation.
"The science of seismology is not able to make reliable and accurate predictions on a time and space scale to be useful to human beings. Maybe in 100 years that will change, although efforts to predict earthquakes reliably and accurately have been going on for more than 100 years with not only no progress, but the more people try it, the more we realize how difficult it is," he said.
"So, the most important thing is to have safe buildings that will withstand shaking. A large earthquake can happen at any time, anywhere, and without any advance warning. So, we have to do the best we can to prepare for earthquake resistance and earthquake resilience in advance," he said.
Recent occurrence of major earthquakes share no detectable connection: seismologist
