An Earthquake of 7.4 Magnitude in Taiwan killed 9, more than 900 injured and many more are still missing. The Epicentre of the Earthquake was just off Taiwan’s sparsely populated east coast.
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Taiwan’s Biggest Earthquake in 25 Years…
Nine people were killed and over 900 were injured in Taiwan’s largest earthquake in at least 25 years on Wednesday. Additionally, 50 workers who were being transported in minibuses to a hotel in a national park went missing.
In the hilly, thinly inhabited county of Hualien, close to the epicentre of the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck just offshore at roughly 8 a.m. (00:01 GMT) led to large-scale landslides, several homes tipped at hazardous angles.
Some people were observed spending the night in tents and other forms of shelter when night fell. Numerous emergency personnel were working to demolish buildings that were judged unsalvageable and shore up those that were damaged.
All occupants and companies in buildings that were in a perilous condition had been evacuated, according to Hualien City Mayor Hsu Chen-Wei. Four buildings were about to undergo demolition, according to the mayor.
More areas of Taiwan felt a stronger earthquake on Wednesday than any other quakes since 1999, when a 7.7 magnitude tremor hit the middle of the island, killing 2,400 people and injuring 10,000 others.
However, there are far fewer casualties this time around. As on Thursday, police reported that ten people had died, just over one thousand had been injured, and twenty-six were still unaccounted for.
An earthquake with that intensity and very
low number of deaths Miracle or
technology?
“It is a pretty miraculous outcome,” said, a professor of political science and public
policy at Northeastern University who studies the resilience of cities, calling the toll “a
a very low number of deaths by a strong, powerful earthquake near an urban centre.”
Taiwan’s advanced early-warning system is a crucial component of its security framework. When a significant earthquake occurs, the system uses a network of seismic sensors throughout the island to send messages to people’s phones and automatically pause live TV to give locals a few seconds’ notice. There are certain similarities between it and the systems in use in California. “The ShakeAlert system in the United States can send notifications to all of our phones that resemble Amber Alerts, but it isn’t integrated into broadcast media in the same manner, Social media videos featured TV snippets of Taiwanese news shows in which on-screen warnings arrived before the shaking began.
In Taiwan, “there is a more comprehensive warning capability, The systems in both Taiwan and the U.S. work by detecting “P-waves” from an earthquake and calculating their strength before sending alerts through the internet networks.
The Words of Survivors of the Taiwan Earthquake
Survivor says rocks began to fall ‘like bullets’
A survivor of an earthquake in Taiwan related how the nearby earthquakes shot rockslides out of the ground “like bullets.” Chu, the survivor, said to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, “Everyone ran beside the sandbags for cover as the mountain started raining rocks like bullets.”
“It was so shaky I could barely walk,” a second woman who worked across from the destroyed Uranus building in Hualien City told the BBC. I was quite afraid. I started to lose control over my legs.
I’m grateful to my coworkers for dragging me along so we could leave. “As we were leaving, a lot of dust began entering our building. We discovered later that it originated from the half-fallen building across the street.
Effects on the world from the Taiwan earthquake?
Taiwan is important to the global tech industry like saying oxygen is
important to breathing. Taiwan manufactures 80 to 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced computer chips — ones for which there is no current substitute.
manufactured on the island’s 12 fabrication plants, or “fabs.” Luckily, all of those fabs are located away from the core of the April 3 earthquake on the western side of the island. However, even a small vibration can cause significant disruptions to the extremely sensitive process of producing semiconductors, leading to the cessation or even damage of some machines.
However, TSMC stated that within a few hours of the earthquake, production was returning to normal.
What Causes the Earthquake?
Earthquakes originate from abrupt movement along internal faults. Seismic waves are released by the movement as “elastic strain” energy, and these waves travel through the Earth and generate shaking on the earth’s Surface.
What drives the movement of tectonic plates?
Over very long time periods, the asthenosphere acts like a fluid. To explain what causes the movement of tectonic plates, several opposing ideas have been proposed.
The following three factors have been postulated as the primary causes of tectonic plate movement:
Warm mantle currents drive and transport lithosphere plates along a conveyor belt in the mantle convection current system.
Ridge push, also known as buoyant upwelling mantle at mid-ocean ridges, occurs when warm, recently formed plates at oceanic ridges elevate themselves above the colder, denser plate material farther away. This movement is caused by gravity, which pushes away the lithosphere that is located farther away from the ridge.
Slab pull: As older, colder plates cool and become denser than the underlying mantle, they sink at subduction zones, dragging the remaining, warmer plates behind them.
Earthquake Epicenter
The epicentre is the location on the Earth’s surface that marks
where the earthquake was initiated. It is not the actual location of
the earthquake, but rather the superposition onto the surface.
The epicentre tends to be the point on the surface that experiences the most shaking. It is the first place the seismic waves hit the surface after the initial rupture has occurred.
However, this is not always the case.An earthquake’s initial hypocenter may be one of numerous hotspots where energy is released if the rupture is exceptionally large.
Earthquake pre-warning:
From the epicenter, earthquakes send out many waves, like ripples on a pond. The ripples that spread the fastest are not the destructive ones; rather, they are a harbinger, a Paul Revere rider.
Taiwan made slow progress toward earthquake safety, which called for public education, faith in the government, and confidence in experts.