Discussion on ‘Was the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake triggered by Zipingpu Reservoir?’

Some recent publications presented a result suggesting that Zipingpu reservoir hastened the occurrence of the 2008 <i<M</i<<sub<S</sub<8.0 Wenchuan earthquake by tens to hundreds of years. Their researches calculated the Coulomb stress change induced by Zipingpu reservoir on the rupturing fault of Wenchuan earthquake. Their results, however, are critically dependent upon the 3-D event location, reservoir location, and the fault plane orientation. We repeated Ge et al.'s work in this paper and found that an improper dip angle parameter of their 2-D fault model might lead to a wrong conclusion. Both the modeling results based on the 2-D model and 3-D model with proper fault parameters will show Coulomb stress changes alone were neither large enough nor had the correct orientation to affect the occurrence of Wenchuan earthquake, which supports our recent argument based on the local seismicity analysis and the induced Coulomb stress change calculation with a 3-D model.