{"id":26765,"date":"2018-02-07T08:04:34","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T08:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=26765"},"modified":"2018-02-07T08:04:34","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T08:04:34","slug":"hualien-earthquake-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2018\/02\/07\/hualien-earthquake-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Taroko Gorge: the potential effects of the M=6.4 Hualien earthquake yesterday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taroko Gorge: the potential effects of the M=6.4 Hualien earthquake yesterday<\/h4>\n

The M=6.4 earthquake near to Hualien in Taiwan<\/a> yesterday is known to have caused some building collapses in the city.\u00a0 Rescue operations are ongoing; hopefully the impacts will not be too severe.\u00a0 The epicentre of the earthquake was very close to the mouth of the Li Wu River to the north of Hualien.\u00a0 This is the USGS Shakemap data for the earthquake<\/a>:-<\/p>\n

\"Hualien

The USGS Shakemap data for the Hualien earthquake yesterday<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The course of the Li Wu river is the alignment of the Central Cross Island Highway, the most important road linking the east and west coasts of Taiwan.\u00a0 The west end of this road was profoundly damaged during the 1999 Chi Chi Earthquake<\/a>, and indeed the northern branch on the western side of the Central Mountains has not reopened.\u00a0 On the east side of the island the highway runs along the base of Taroko Gorge through a National Park, truly one of the great natural wonders of the world.\u00a0 This area is very special to me as I spent a large part of the early stages of my academic career undertaking fieldwork in Taroko Gorge – it is an area that I know well and love.<\/p>\n

The effects of this earthquake will be fascinating as the Central Cross Island Highway is very prone to landslides and rockfalls.\u00a0 The Taroko Gorge section has been carved into the base of what are usually described as marble cliffs, although in reality the geology is a mixture of marble and schist in many places.\u00a0 This is an area that suffers landslides on a regular basis; its performance during significant shaking has always been a concern.<\/p>\n

To date I have found one image of the impact of the earthquake, via Twitter<\/a>, which suggests multiple small detachments:<\/p>\n

\"Hualien

The effects of the Hualien earthquake on the Central Cross Island Highway in Taroko Gorge. Image via Twitter<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

In recent years a huge amount of effort has been put into making this road more resilient to rockfalls.\u00a0 If it has come through this earthquake relatively unscathed (and reports suggest that it is open, although we await confirmation of this) then it will be a major triumph for the engineers. The image above shows however that it was very fortunate that the earthquake occurred late at night, when there were no tourists, and little traffic, on the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The M=6.4 Hualien earthquake yesterday in Taiwan occurred close to Taroko Gorge, which provides the alignment for the Central Cross Island Highway. This is a road that is prone to landslides and rockfalls. It will be fascinating to see how the slopes performed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":26771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[537],"tags":[23,881,469,103,27,56,81],"class_list":["post-26765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earthquake-induced-landslide","tag-earthquake","tag-east-asia","tag-featured","tag-highway","tag-road","tag-rockfall","tag-taiwan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}