Pulverizing Peaks

China is leveling hundreds of inconveniently placed mountains:

Entire mountaintops are being razed to fill in valleys, paving the way for future cities. The problem is that no one really knows what they’re doing. “[E]arth-moving on this scale without scientific support is folly,” warn three Chinese engineering professors in Nature.

As China plans to move 100 million rural people into cities, quick and dirty construction has become the norm. You see buildings that are barely finished fall apart. These mountain-moving projects are similarly hasty, but they’re being carried out on an even more massive scale by engineers with little experience in flattening mountains. What if, for example, a city built on unstable soil collapses in the rain? That’s a legitimate fear in Yan’an, just one of several cities being created on flattened land.

More on the phenomenon:

Mountaintop moving has been done before in strip mining, especially in the eastern United States. But it has never been carried out on this scale. In China, dozens of hills 100 to 150 meters in height are being flattened over hundreds of kilometers. Such infill has never been used for urban construction. There are no guidelines for creating land in the complex geological and hydrogeological conditions that are typical of mountainous zones.