Search

This article reports that seismologists Selwyn Sacks and Alan Linde of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, have stated that "earthquake weather" in Taiwan is blustery. While they were monitoring the strain within boreholes in eastern Taiwan during the second half of 2004, nine typhoons passed over, they reported. During five of them, so-called slow earthquakes swept unfelt across the deep, inclined fault below. Sacks and Linde reason that the low atmospheric pressure at the heart of typhoons can relieve some of the pressure squeezing the fault and keeping it from slipping. Earlier this year, some climate researchers warned that the climate system could be so sensitive to rising greenhouse gases that the next century would see truly scorching heat. In simulations with extremely high sensitivities, they found unrealistically large temperature swings between winter and summer region by region.

This article focuses on a geological study related to Taiwan.Taiwan consists of an active mountain belt, produced by the collision of the Eurasian and Philippine Sea plates, which forms the spine of the island. The mountains are being eroded by the many landslides caused by earthquakes and typhoons. Researchers found that at any given water discharge rate, the sediment load carried by a flood increased by a factor of 4 in the epicentral area. The earthquake, which produced 20,000 landslides, increased the rate of erosion, the amount of sediment delivered to the watershed, and the amount of sediment that is ultimately deposited in marine basins around the coast.