NEW DELHI—The world’s largest dam is rising in one of the world’s most geopolitically treacherous and seismically unstable regions. Just a few kilometers from the heavily militarized border with India, China is constructing an unprecedented hydropower project in Tibet on the Yarlung Tsangpo, the world’s highest-altitude major river, better known internationally as the Brahmaputra.

The super-dam will dwarf China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, in power-generating capacity. Its reservoir will impound a gargantuan volume of water above millions of people downstream in India’s northeast and deltaic Bangladesh, much of which lies barely above sea level.

Now the most troubling warning is coming not from foreign critics but from China’s own scientists. A recent paper published in the state-linked, Mandarin-language journal Sedimentary Geology and Tethyan Geology identifies serious geological hazards at the construction site. The geologists conclude that the terrain has a “loose structure and weak cohesion” and warn that fault movement or an earthquake could easily trigger large-scale instability, threatening both the reservoir and surrounding infrastructure. The authors recommend reinforcing the reservoir slopes, installing retaining structures, and redesigning key elements to reduce the risk of catastrophe.

When scientists working under a communist regime issue such warnings, the international community must pay attention.

The new dam is rising at the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra, where the river plunges steeply through the world’s deepest and longest canyon before entering India. It also sits squarely within the Himalayan seismic belt, created by the slow-motion collision of the Indian........

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