The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) is to start building the nation’s first volcano alert system this year, Seismological Center Director Chen Kuo-chang (陳國昌) said yesterday.
The Datun Volcano Group (大屯火山群) in northern Taiwan and Turtle Island (Guishan Island, 龜山島) off the coast in Yilan County are active volcanoes, but the nation lacks a system to warn the public about possible eruptions, the bureau said.
“We will spend this year and next building a national volcano alert system and establishing the procedures that we should follow in issuing warnings,” Chen said.
The preliminary plan calls for a three-level warning system, he said.
The first level would mean all monitored parameters for volcanic activity are normal, while level two would indicate the parameters are higher than normal and volcanic activity might flare up, he said.
“Before issuing a third-level alert, we would consult geological experts, who would decide if the bureau should take the case to a consultation meeting,” he said.
“The consultation meeting would be attended by experts, central government officials from disaster prevention and relief agencies as well as those from Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung. They would assess the likelihood of a volcanic eruption and the actions that need to be taken in response to an eruption, before issuing the alert,” he added.
The bureau would also use a green, yellow and red scale to show the public if they need to heed certain events, Chen said.
Japan, the Philippines and New Zealand use a five-level warning system because they experience frequent volcanic activity, Chen said.
However, the Datun Volcano Group is less active than volcanoes in those nations, he added.
The bureau would use data it has already collected, such as earthquakes caused by volcanic activity, ground temperature and surface deformation, to determine normal values for the alert system and the procedures to be followed.
A long-term study conducted by Academia Sinica researcher Lin Cheng-horng (林正洪) and his team last year announced that the Datun group and Turtle Island are still active, meaning that they must have erupted within the past 10,000 years and have magma reservoirs under them.
The study showed that the area around Turtle Island contained shadows and reflections of S-waves, one of the two main types of elastic body waves in seismology, which means there might be a magma reservoir in the area, and magma was found in the island’s central crust, which conclusively proved that the island has an active volcano, Lin said.
Lin’s team also detected a volcanic “pulse” from the Datun volcanoes, with an earthquake occurring on average about every 18 minutes, a phenomenon that lasts for hours.
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