A study into the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that struck Hualien County and took 17 lives in February found yesterday that it was caused by a fault line at sea, instead of movement along the Milun Fault in downtown Hualien as was initially suspected.
After a month of examining the earthquake’s aftershocks, the Central Geological Survey (CGS) study used a 3D visualization program to rebuild the focal mechanism — the direction of slip in an earthquake and the orientation of the fault — of the Feb. 6 earthquake and confirmed that it came from a fault line at sea that was about 13km northeast of the epicenter.
“The Milun Fault is inclined at an angle that was opposite to the source fault, which means it was not the cause of the earthquake,” CGS Acting Director Tsao Shuh-jong (曹恕中) said.
The Milun Fault runs southwest from the Cisingtan (七星潭) shoreline to the west side of Meilun Mountain (美崙山) and turns south-southeast under downtown Hualien. The 7.2km fault line ends south of Hualien City at sea.
However, the CGS said it knows very little about the fault line to be blamed for the recent earthquake, because it is at sea, but that it is located in a region where the Philippine Sea Plate goes under the Eurasian Plate.
As there has been no more significant seismic activity in the region, it is unlikely that the fault line would trigger more earthquakes there, said Lu Shih-ting (盧詩丁), section chief of the CGS Active Tectonics Division.
Compared with a 1951 earthquake also in Hualien, which measured more than magnitude 7.0 and was triggered by the Milun Fault, the Feb. 6 earthquake was relatively small, Lu said.
After the February earthquake, the Milun Fault slipped by about 70cm and its surface lifted a maximum of 15cm, compared with 2m of slip and 1.2m of lift in 1951, Lu said.
“The 1951 earthquake was about 30 times more powerful than the one in February,” he said.
The CGS would use the new data it has obtained to change the designattion of the area around the Milun Fault to a geologically sensitive one so that developers would have to follow tighter laws if they want to build there, Tsao said.
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