Earthquakes 2017

Instead of breathing fire it just spits gobs of red crap over the city.

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Maybe Betelsauras can fight it out.

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4 earthquakes in quite different locations in the last 24 hrs - I know this is Taiwan and earthquakes happen every day but is that a bit unusual…?

If you quadrangulated them, the centre would probably be around Chiayi?

Which is the biggest plate Taiwan is under? I mean, all 4 quakes are from local faults, right? So the one pushing them is bigger? :runaway:

Taiwan is formed on a complex convergent boundary between the Yangtze Subplate of Eurasian Plate to the west and north, the Okinawa Plate on the north-east, the Philippine Plate on the east and south, and the Sunda Plate to the southwest.

So we’re surrounded!

The upper part of the crust on the island is primarily made up of a series of terranes, mostly old island arcs which have been forced together by the collision of the forerunners of the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, which is moving to the northeast

I wish I knew more about earthquakes - but there’s limited information out there. I think that’s partly a problem with a stagnation amongst academics studying quakes

Consider all the advances we have seen in our lifetime but I can’t think of any significant advance in earthquake prediction in the last 50 years

Stagnation?! :eek:

One would think that after two huge quake disasters with tsunami included - Boxing day 2004 and Japan 2011- the science of quakes would be ablaze, filled with tons of data…and fiercely motivated.

My impeession is that the quake research is probably the best funded among all sciences in Taiwan. Typhoon might take the second.

However, I do not see any investigation report to follow how the quake research fundings are utilized and what is the difference the money has made, if there is any.

Well, since last info published was about liquefaction and seeing how it affected prizes of real estate in Taipei alone, well, I guess whatever discoveries they make will not be warmly embraced and shouted throughout the land.

That seems to be the case. Quake scientists did collect valuable data but the KMT governments, Ma presidency at the top along with Hau’s Taipei, Chu’s Xinbei and their other mayorships, block data to be released.

Now see, they need to get Jo and Bill and Dusty and the gang on the job.


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I don’t know how to tell you this but Dusty’s dead.

We are all just dusty in the wind.

I guess they are trying but… there’s still no accurate prediction system or even any real public guidance

I have a friend who edits a lot of earthquake papers and although he points to a field of research related to the ionosphere that supposedly offers some promising data, he agrees that there is an awful lot of ‘nothing research’ that involves writing papers on past quakes that have already been studied to death and are just a way for academics to look like they are doing something to justify their tax payer funded existence

The problem with the ionospheric research at this stage seems to be too many ‘false-positives’

Coming from someone who knows stuff-all, I would have thought the way to go would be to get their heads out of the ionosphere and down into the earth’s crust where the action is. Given that the earthquakes result from a build-up of pressure, it would seem to make sense to insert probes into known fault lines and measure that pressure - how hard could that be?

Thanks for harshing my mellow, man…

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Sorry, my mistake.
Probably more like a job for Harry Stamper and the boys…


Take a look at the latest quake map in CWB. I really, really do not like that look of being surrounded. Last one was in Hsinchu.

It is an underground Godzilla moving upward from the South to Northern Taiwan. Started in Kaohsiung, then on to Changhua, Hualien, Yilan…

Yilan and Hualien have quakes almost daily all the time. In Yilan they’re usually centered around Turtle island, in the mountains in Datong or around the Suao area where mountains stretch underwater between Yilan and Hualien.
There’s no real increase or decrease in activity here, it’s like 7/11.

Now another - a 4.6er just to the south of Taipei - did you feel that?

Oh, I see it was 80k deep, so probably not

OK, in the ol country, usually it would creep up in intensity until kaboom, a big one. Here in Taiwan what I do not like is that it would be moving a bit up North and then kaboom, down South or Center or nayhwere else we get a kaboom boom! I mean, you get time to prepare, here it si like they strike when and where you expect it the least.

Yeah, I know that’s true - it’s bizarre how many earthquakes there are in Hualien, in particular

Are those daily quakes ‘feelable’, or is it only the mid-4’s to 5er’s?

It is a bit unusual the recent pattern though - quakes popping up all over the island

Of course, probably means nothing - all we can do is note the anomalies over time and check back later when ‘the big one’ does happen - and see if there were any signs