The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) is continually improving its earthquake monitoring technology and expertise to detect and report earthquakes within 30 seconds of their occurrence, a senior bureau official in charge of seismology said yesterday.
By the end of next year, the Seismology Center should be able to detect the epicenter and intensity of a quake in Taiwan within 30 seconds of its occurrence, a proposal submitted by the bureau to the Legislative Yuan for budget screening said.
The bureau would also aim to disseminate disaster information within seconds by text messaging, fax, e-mail and other Internet-based systems, the proposal said.
Seismology Center Director Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋) said the center maintained 109 earthquake monitoring stations nationwide and could detect the intensity and epicenter of a quake within 35 seconds — the fastest anywhere in the world.
In comparison, Kuo said, Japan could detect an earthquake and report on it within one minute, while the US could do it within 40 minutes to 50 minutes, mostly because of its vast territory.
“Twenty years ago, when the center only had 22 monitoring stations, Taiwan needed about 40 minutes to detect and report on an earthquake,” Kuo said.
The budget proposal said about NT$364 million (US$11 million) would be required to increase the number of underground seismic observation stations and build an undersea marine seismic observation system off the east coast.
The Seismology Center said 70 percent of earthquakes around Taiwan originated off the northeast coast, which tended to affect the greater Taipei area. However, all its existing earthquake monitoring systems were located on land.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS