A Human Trigger for the Great Quake of Sichuan?

Natural disasters are often described as “acts of God,” but within days of last May's devastating earthquake in China's Sichuan Province, seismologists in and out of China were quietly wondering whether humans might have had a hand in it. Now, the first researchers have gone public with evidence that stresses from water piled behind the new Zipingpu Dam may have triggered the failure of the nearby fault, a failure that went on to rupture almost 300 kilometers of fault and kill some 80,000 people.