Does anyone have contacts with Yunnan's Geology departments??
The huge underground river system feeding Fu Xian lake is at question.
Do they have studies on these underground river systems in Yunnan?
Which direction does the water come from ?
Does any one in the sport of spelunking have contacts with cave scuba divers from the US or europe...? This may be a treasure to them.
I was talking to regular scuba divers which said the current is too strong to swim in the under water caves/ rivers..
Might be worth looking at/for the Hydrology Depts as well.
Maybe off topic a bit, but there are stories about a sunken Atlantis in that lake. Supposedly Chinese archeologic submarines have been invovled in a project researching it, and meanwhile found traces of a (presumably) Han-dynasty sunken city. But both the theory, and the evidence, seem somewhat vague - even mysterious.
Then again, in Sichuan there is a lake we know for sure that has a Ming city on the bottom. Fishermen still got Ming-dynasty stuff stuck in their nets a hundred years ago. All collapsed after an earthquake. Gejiu, in Yunnan, got its lake after an earthquake too.
And talking about it, some geological rumors say, that the drought of several years in Yunnan, will bring some new lakes soon; we just need a big shake again. And it will come. Where next..?
Continuing the off topic theme.
There are a few sunken huts on the edge of the river near Baimachang, after the recent earthquake the land sunk. The huts were in about 2m of water. With the rains they probably disapeared.
Imagine if this happened 200 years ago, or more. Before photograhs, with local enbelishment generation after generation. The huts become a village, then a town, then a city. The river then could not swallow a city, and so it morphs to a local lake (if there is a local deep one). Fishermen of old used to drag up artifacts, but not for a hundred years or so.
Link to the photos tiger tiger is describing
paraglideyunnan.smugmug.com/[...]
In the first picture, I think the shingle on the left of the picture used to be the river bed. The ground on the right sank several meters, below the level of the original river bed. The water flows from right to left.
On the opposite bank you can clearly see rock next to red sediment which seems to have been uplifted over time....supporting the previous post's theory..
