Taiwan intends to build its first undersea seismic station, designed to improve the country’s early warning system and save valuable seconds when earthquakes strike, officials said yesterday.
The station, which is scheduled to come into service in 2011, would help reduce the margin of error when monitoring undersea quakes and improve on the nation’s existing system of land-based seismic stations.
The new facility would provide a roughly 10 second warning ahead of earthquakes and a 10 minute alert ahead of the impact of a tsunami, said Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋), director of the Central Weather Bureau’s Seismological Center.
“The few seconds extra will give people precious time to seek shelter and flee coastal areas in the case of killer quakes,” he said.
NEC of Japan won the NT$423 million (US$13 million) contract to build the station, which will be situated some 45km off the northeastern coast, an area frequently hit by earthquakes, he said.
Taiwan’s three-phase earthquake early warning system has slashed the time of quake detection from up to three minutes in 1992 to around 35 seconds today.
Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates, is regularly shaken by earthquakes. A 7.6-magnitude quake killed about 2,400 people on Sept. 21, 1999.
Aftershocks from a magnitude 6.2 earthquake that struck off Yilan County at 3:45pm yesterday could reach a magnitude of 5 to 5.5, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Seismological Center technical officer Chiu Chun-ta (邱俊達) told a news conference that the epicenter of the temblor was more than 100km from Taiwan. Although predicted to measure between magnitude 5 and 5.5, the aftershocks would reach an intensity of 1 on Taiwan’s 7-tier scale, which gauges the actual effect of an earthquake, he said. The earthquake lasted longer in Taipei because the city is in a basin, he said. The quake’s epicenter was about 128.9km east-southeast
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