Taiwan Quake Excites Those in Shaky Sciences

Set. 21 -- Taiwan is a seismically jittery place, and researchers said the earthquake that rocked the island early Tuesday is not related to the recent ones in Greece and Turkey.

Taiwan, which sits on the edge of two plates on the Earth’s crust, the Eurasian and the Philippine plates, gets shaken by dozens of quakes each year.

Most are centered in the Pacific Ocean east of the island and rarely cause damage. The magnitude 7.6 quake that hit Taiwan early Tuesday was very unusual because it occurred beneath the island’s central mountains.

The quake killed more than 1,700 people. It was Taiwan’s worst since a 7.4 magnitude temblor hit the island in 1935, killing 3,276 people. In 1986, a magnitude 7.8 quake off Taiwan’s east coast killed 15.

This quake was centered about 120 miles south of the capital, Taipei, in the Changyung Mountains. The mountains, which soar as high as 13,000 feet, are riddled with faults, but not much is known about their instability because the area is not as seismically active as the fault zone off the island’s east coast.

Going on Field Trip

Several geologists and engineers from the United States were preparing to fly to Taiwan for a closer look at the physical changes that may have occurred to the island, as well as the damage to buildings and roadways.

“This earthquake is the only major one to occur in 40 years within this mountain range,” said seismologist Jeff Barker of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “This could be the piece of information to explain what’s happening geologically in Taiwan.”

The combination of the earthquake’s magnitude, location and damage caught scientists off guard Tuesday.

“In my experience, this is largest occurring in Taiwan, and one of the very large ones in history,” said Wai-Ying Chung, a University of Memphis seismologist who studied in Taiwan. “It is comparable to the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, and the 1976 earthquake in China.”