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7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

earthquake.usgs.gov

61–70 of 183 posts

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#61
post #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-eva…

I'm hopeful for the 3nm Tainan fabs, but I expect disruption at the Taichung and Hsinchu fabs since the quake was felt in Taipei. It's common for the equipment to be recalibrated and tested, if you can feel an event. I suspect this was felt in the west. Hopefully, not down for a week, if everything is good.

Hopefully, the towns and people on the east coast are OK, but this one is big.

edit- Since there are reports of shaking in Kaohsiung (farther south than Tainan), I'm less hopeful for the southern fabs.

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#63
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?

3 meters is significant if you live in an inundation zone. You can see the effect on a seaside community here: https://www.floodmap.net

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#64

What’s the significance of an earthquake’s depth?

Shallower earthquakes cause much more damage (on the surface), esp. if near densely populated areas; also depends greatly on how earthquake-proof structures and buildings are. Today's one was 34km deep/21 miles.

1989 SF (Loma Prieta) was magnitude 6.9, epicenter 56 mi south of SF, depth 11 miles. (Typical California earthquake focal depths are 4 to 6 miles).

1906 huge SF earthquake was magnitude 7.9, depth 5 miles.

2008 Sichuan, China earthquake (87,587 killed) was magnitude 8.0, depth 19 km.

2011 Fukushima, Japan earthquake(+ tsunami) was magnitude 9.0, depth of 18.6 mi/30km at sea.

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#65
post #3

As of 40 minutes after the event, someone has already created a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Taiwan_earthquake

While it's cool that Wikipedia could be used for breaking news, "Recentism"[0] is generally not seen favorably on Wikipedia

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recentism

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#66

Report from the Taiwan agency: https://www.cwa.gov.tw/V8/E/E/EQ/EQ113019-0403-075809.html And a list of all recent earthquakes, showing the aftershocks: https://www.cwa.gov.tw/V8/E/E/index.html

Whenever I look at those reports, I keep wondering how many automated systems have to be there in place to generate all that. All the waveform records, the intensity maps, etc..., they should be all auto-generated, and likely verified by humans afterwards? Would be super curious of the IT setup and deployment of such things.

This also likely feeds into the automatic warning systems (sent to mobile phones to warn of an incming earthquake, tsunami, or something else), which is likely going to be discussed afterwards, as loads of people didn't get a warning. (As opposted to recent Chinese satellite launch where _everyone_ got the overly scary rocket alert.)

Edit: now they are saying their calculation has to project a minimum "peak ground acceleration" (PGA) of 25 (what units?) to have an alert, and a lot of the places didn't hit that, in part due to underestimating the intensity at the epicentre. I guess they will be revising this criteria, as this was overly conservative on the "less noise" side, while people are likely more forgiving in reverse (getting an alert when they didn't need one).

Re: 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

#69
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As somebody who has been through more than 10 thousand quakes What's this now?

There are a LOT of very small/deep/etc quakes in some places.

Sure, I see Riverside CA had over 6000 last year, though I doubt if someone who moved there two years ago would say they've "been through" over 10,000 quakes since, depending on their sensitivity, they might not have felt any of them, or maybe a dozen of them or something. I'm interested in specifics!
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