Construction of a railway in southwestern China from Sichuan province to Tibet is still on track despite having to navigate areas where extreme heat from the Earth’s crust has made working close to impossible.
A significant proportion of its route involves tunnelling through rock too hot for humans or machines to bear, with ground temperatures of up to 89 degrees Celsius (192 degrees Fahrenheit) – the highest on record for a transport infrastructure project, according to geologists.
When the Tibetan plateau was created by a collision between the Eurasian plate and the Indian subcontinent, with the tectonic force giving rise to the Himalayas, an enormous amount of heat was trapped inside the elevated crust.
The 1,543km (959-mile) Sichuan-Tibet railway has to cross more than 40 major fault lines, more than attempted by any previous rail project.
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Blue high-speed trains match south China's Hainan island’s sky and sea
Blue high-speed trains match south China's Hainan island’s sky and sea
“The underground heat sources spread upwards along the fault zone and generate random local heat spots, causing frequent geothermal disasters,” said geophysics professor Lan Hengxing and his colleagues with the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, in a paper published last week in the domestic peer-reviewed publication Journal of Engineering Geology.