to possibly be the disaster that gave rise to the Gun-Yu flood myth,[citation needed] which preceded the establishment of the Xia dynasty.
The Lajia archaeological site, downstream of the Jishi Gorge, was first destroyed by the earthquake and later covered by sediments from the flood eruption.
An earthquake triggered landslides and rock avalanches that dammed the Yellow River in Jishi Gorge west of present-day Mengda township (孟达乡) in Xunhua County, eastern Qinghai Province, near the border of Gansu Province about 100 kilometres west of Lanzhou.
Calculations based on both the volume of water and its head in the impoundment area at Xunhua, and also reconstructed cross-sections of the floodplain at Guanting estimate the peak flow at the outlet to be approximately 480,000 cubic meters per second, which is more than 500 times the current flow of the Yellow River at the Jishi Gorge.
The sediments consist exclusively of angular clasts of greenschist and purple-brown mudrock sourced from Jishi Gorge.
[1] Finds at the archaeological site of Lajia located 25 kilometers downstream from the dam show the devastation following the earthquake and then the flood, which together completely destroyed the settlement.