Environmentalists and academics on Wednesday again protested expansion plans for CPC Corp, Taiwan’s natural gas facility in Datan Borough (大潭) in Taoyuan’s Guanyin District (觀音), saying they endanger algal reefs near the site.
State-owned CPC’s planned liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in Datan — where the company already operates an LNG storage terminal and a power plant — has been a source of controversy with environmentalists.
The natural gas facility is part of a planned expansion of an industrial zone on land that the government is to reclaim from the sea off Datan’s coast.
Marine biologists Allen Chen (陳昭倫) and Liu Ching-yu (劉靜榆) said the journal Coral Reefs’ publication of “Unprecedented Calcareous Algal Reefs in Northern Taiwan Merit a High Conservation Priority,” a paper they co-authored, proves that the project should be halted.
Chen and Liu are researchers at Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center and the Council of Agriculture’s Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute, respectively.
“Coral Reefs is in the top 10th percentile of international academic journals in the field. Papers pass a rigorous anonymous peer-review process before publication,” Chen said. “The acceptance of our paper proves it is an undeniable scientific fact that the algal reefs off Datan are world-class natural heritage.”
Liu said CPC plans to reclaim land in a sandy area of the sea floor for its terminal, but the construction zone lies close to the low-tide line, where the coral reefs are.
“The special thing about Taoyuan’s algal reefs is that they are found on the gravel layer of the sea floor, formed by the Gushihmen (古石門) alluvial fan. This allows coralline algae to grow,” Liu said.
In addition, the researchers were able to document three species of large laced morays, predators whose presence proves the reefs support a flourishing eco-system, Liu said.
With the ocean’s fish populations diminishing, the Datan reefs are highly valuable as a sustainable food source, Liu added.
Taoyuan Local Union director-general Pan Chong-cheng (潘忠政) said he was happy that the reefs, which run along 27km of the city’s coastline, were receiving attention from the international academic community, adding that the union would initiate an international petition to save the formations.
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
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
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