China aftermath of 'Quake

The official death toll across the whole of China had been put as 11,921. But the state-run news reported that more than 12,000 people were killed in Sichuan alone. The guess at the numbers who died have been rising steadily throughout the day.

Road, rail, air and phone links to the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake were cut, and this stops people getting in to help. It is feared that the quake was China's deadliest since 1976, when 240,000 people were killed in the city of Tangshan, near Beijing. There are still many, many people out in the streets. They don't want to go back into the buildings because there are rumours of aftershocks.

A professor at the University of Leeds who has researched earthquakes in China, said: "You can get very large earthquakes occurring where buildings are well constructed, and you might get 50 or 100 people dying. If the buildings are poorly constructed, you can get 10,000 or 20,000 deaths."

Just east of the epicenter, 1,000 students and teachers were killed or missing at a collapsed high school . Many mums and dads are still waiting outside schools to see if their “only child” is going to be pulled out of the rubble under the collapsed buildings. Many school pupils are still missing and this is their future.

See this in pictures here or here . Read more here. There is a reminder on how earthquakes happen also here from the BBC.