There are three or four high-risk faults in the populous Chianan Plain (嘉南平原) beneath Chiayi County and Tainan, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) said yesterday, declining to provide details to avoid causing panic.
About 10 faults of various lengths are in the area, but only three or four of them are considered dangerous, CWB Seismological Center Director Chen Kuo-chang (陳國昌) said.
As no dislocation has been recorded from the faults for a long time, their seismic activity should be monitored closely because the accumulated energy could be high, he said.
Photo courtesy of the Central Weather Bureau
However, there is no ideal way of predicting earthquakes, and even calculating the long-term probability of a quake can be difficult, he said.
Former CWB director-general Shyn Tzay-chyn (辛在勤) told reporters at a news conference in Taipei that the Meishan (梅山), Chuko (觸口), Baihe (白河) and Sinhua (新化) faults in the Chianan Plain have long been considered potentially hazardous faults, and some seismologists believe that the Muchiliao (木屐寮) fault is a high-risk feature.
The risk levels of the faults have been known for nearly 50 years, but there was no reason to alarm people by discussing them, he said.
The latest research by the Central Geological Survey revealed 36 active faults nationwide, with seismologists warning about the Shanchiao fault (山腳斷層) beneath the Taipei basin.
Chen said that the risk of Shanchiao causing large earthquakes is quite low, adding that the fault has not caused earthquakes or rifts, or dislocated in the past century.
Some people are concerned that the Chishang fault (池上斷層) might dislocate, as the hypocenter of the main shock of Sunday’s magnitude 6.8 earthquake was near it.
“It is not certain” whether dislocation would occur, Chen said, adding that “only time will tell.”
Regarding this week’s series of earthquakes, Chen said that the temblors should gradually stop, with 164 earthquakes recorded as of 9:30am yesterday.
Aftershocks are expected to decrease in magnitude and frequency over the next four weeks, with a slim chance of a magnitude 5 quake today, he said.
The center has not yet identified an active fault linked to the quakes, the main shock of which was the strongest onshore earthquake to hit Taitung since 1973.
Since neither the main shock nor the foreshocks that reached magnitude 6 occurred along Chishang’s fault lines, it is certain that the quakes were not triggered by the Chishang fault system as some seismologists suggested, Chen said.
In response to speculation that the source of the quakes could be a blind active fault under the Central Mountain Range, Chen said no active fault line under the principal mountain range on Taiwan had been discovered, citing Central Geological Survey data from last year.
The survey would conduct further studies to determine if the Central Mountain Range fault is active but blind, which is still under debate in the seismology community, he added.
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