The bushfires that swept through Australia last year were connected to a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD), which is expected to become more frequent due to climate change, a geologist studying coral fossils said yesterday.
National Taiwan University Department of Geosciences professor Shen Chuan-chou (沈川洲) since 2001 has been working with Australian and US researchers to study climate systems in the Indian Ocean.
Led by Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences professor Nerilie Abram, the team published a paper on IOD in the journal Nature on March 9.
Photo courtesy of Nerilie Abram via CNA
The bushfires resulted from a positive IOD event, when the region east of the Indian Ocean becomes drier and there is a reduced chance of rainfall in Australia, Shen told an online news conference held at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taipei.
To understand the change in climate over the past centuries, the team drilled the cores of live and fossil coral off Sumatra, Indonesia, as coral can be viewed as a thermometer of ocean temperature, Shen said.
Shen’s laboratory used radiometric uranium-thorium dating techniques to identify the ages of the coral samples.
The most important finding was that the climate systems in the Indian and Pacific oceans are “interconnected,” which previously had been a disputed hypothesis, he said.
While similar dating techniques used by other laboratories might have a margin of error of one to two years, Shen said that his laboratory had reduced the margin of error to as little as three months.
The team found that positive IOD events often occur in conjunction with El Nino in the central Pacific Ocean, he said.
Models show that strong IOD events have been increasing and they might become more extreme due to global warming, he added.
Nonetheless, an IOD event in 1675 was estimated to be 42 percent stronger than one documented in 1997, showing that such events are also possible without human-caused global warming, Shen said.
Referring to previous studies of El Nino, Shen said that climate oscillations in the Indian Ocean also affect the climate of Taiwan.
If the temperature in the central Pacific is rising, more typhoons form in the summer and more strike Taiwan in the fall, while rainfall in spring decreases, causing droughts in southern Taiwan, he said.
The government should formulate more policies to mitigate the effects of climate change, Shen said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods