Taiwan said yesterday it had put into service its first undersea seismic observation system, giving the nation lifesaving extra seconds or even minutes to brace for earthquakes and tsunamis.
The NT$420 million (US$14 million) system, built by Japan-based NEC Corp, consists of equipment ranging from ocean-bottom seismographs to tsunami pressure gauges and even underwater microphones.
“The system gives a much clearer picture of what’s happening. We can even hear the sounds of dolphins swimming by,” seismology center director Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋) said.
“With the help of this system, we’ll be able to attain an average of 10 seconds’ extra warning if earthquakes hit off the east coast, and an extra 10 minutes to issue tsunami warnings,” he said.
The nation is regularly hit by earthquakes, as it lies near the junction of two tectonic plates.
The new alert system is centered around a submarine cable beginning at Toucheng Township (頭城), Yilan County, and stretching for 45km into the ocean in a roughly easterly direction.
Nearly 70 percent of the earthquakes that strike Taiwan hit this area, the seismology center said.
The system is deployed at a depth of about 300m, sending real-time digital information to land via submarine optical fiber cable 24 hours a day, NEC said in a statement.
The nation began considering an undersea alert system after the Indian Ocean tsunami in late 2004 killed almost a quarter of a million people.
Another undersea earthquake, as powerful as that which caused the 2004 disaster, triggered a tsunami that struck Japan in March, leaving about 22,000 dead or missing.
“The power of the two quakes was pretty much the same, but the much lower toll figure in Japan shows that early warning systems are very effective in the battle against unexpected natural disasters,” Kuo said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching