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7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

earthquake.usgs.gov

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Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#33
post #21
post #7

I see earthquake reports (like this one) describe earthquake depth. What is the significance of it? Is it somehow actionable?

A shallow 6 is very different from a deeper 7. My city Christchurch was fucked by a 6.2 or 6.3 - but it was both (a) shallow (5km) and (b) close to dense residential areas. Christchurch was near to the 7.1 Canterbury earthquake but that did much less damage as it was 10km deep and Christchurch wasn't on top of it (it mostly affected less dense rural properties in the region near Christchurch). Be careful not to think…

The Nisqually quake in Seattle was a 6.8 but it was 57km (35 miles) deep. It was also on the other side of Tacoma sort of in between Tacoma and Olympia.

The depth of that quake made it a lot less severe than it could have been, only killed one person, but estimated it cost $1b to $4b in damages.

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#34
post #12
post #11

Multiple buildings have collapsed. There will be many fatalities: https://twitter.com/Huberton/status/1775320722115539349 https://twitter.com/dom_lucre/status/1775325642386481216

Man in that second video they look so calm standing under a massive potential landslide that could sweep them to their death.

That first one with the leaning building...have they not seen footage from 9/11 or any disaster movie about how far the debris field can travel in an uncontrolled building collapse? That's a definite nope from me.

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#35
post #19
post #2

Japan’s meteorological agency forecast a tsunami of up to 3 meters (9.8 feet) for those curious https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/02/taiwan-earth...

3 m sound not too bad?

i'm always amazed how little appreciation people have for massive amount of water. a 3m wave will more than ruin your day. trust me, it's plenty

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#36
post #31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I must admit it’s hard to find an answer myself without the vocabulary.

This is where LLMs really shine.

That's a very good point, I was trying to google how buttons on a calculator communicate with the chips underneath, basically how contacts work, and Googling that kept giving me stuff about calculators not electronics, but ChatGPT gave me the perfect bullet point breakdown because it understood the context of my more general question. People often communicate/think in analogies to the underlying concepts.

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#37
post #8

Are fabs knocked offline?

I don't see any major TSMC fabs[0] near the epicenter in Hualien. The Taichung fabs are closer but on the western side, while the Tainan fabs are pretty far away from the quake.

Edit: There will be some disruption as TSMC has evacuated employees[1]. No structural damage reported, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-03/tsmc-evac...

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