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Published October 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

The 1909 Taipei earthquake—implication for seismic hazard in Taipei

Abstract

The 1909 April 14 Taiwan earthquake caused significant damage in Taipei. Most of the information on this earthquake available until now is from the written reports on its macro-seismic effects and from seismic station bulletins. In view of the importance of this event for assessing the shaking hazard in the present-day Taipei, we collected historical seismograms and station bulletins of this event and investigated them in conjunction with other seismological data. We compared the observed seismograms with those from recent earthquakes in similar tectonic environments to characterize the 1909 earthquake. Despite the inevitably large uncertainties associated with old data, we conclude that the 1909 Taipei earthquake is a relatively deep (50–100 km) intraplate earthquake that occurred within the subducting Philippine Sea Plate beneath Taipei with an estimated M_W of 7 ± 0.3. Some intraplate events elsewhere in the world are enriched in high-frequency energy and the resulting ground motions can be very strong. Thus, despite its relatively large depth and a moderately large magnitude, it would be prudent to review the safety of the existing structures in Taipei against large intraplate earthquakes like the 1909 Taipei earthquake.

Additional Information

© 2012 The Authors. Geophysical Journal International © 2012 RAS. Accepted 2012 June 24. Received 2012 May 25; in original form 2012 March 5. We thank our colleagues at many seismological institutions and observatories that helped us explore the availability of valuable historical seismograms and collect them. Just to mention a few: Kenji Satake, Kenshiro Tsumura, Kazuko Noguchi, Luis Rivera, Marius Kriegerowski, Torsten Dahm, Yoshiaki Tamura and Naoya Mikami. We thank Doug Dodge for assisting us in earthquake relocation, Nobuo Hamada for providing and clarifying the seismic station information in Taiwan before 1945, Swaminathan Krishnan for giving us useful suggestions on strong ground motions in Taiwan, Liangchi Hsu for translating some source materials from Japanese to English, and Steve Walter for assistance in searching and scanning seismograms. We thank the IRIS Data management Center for providing us access to the global broad-band seismograms, and the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) Japan for providing the access to the F-net broad-band seismograms. The copies of the pages of the Gutenberg notepad used in this study were provided by the Archives of the California Institute of Technology with the help of Charlotte Erwin. We are grateful to Rick Benson and Adam Clark of the IRIS Data Management Center in creating the web pages for the 1909 Taipei earthquake. We wish to thank Dave Boore, Jim Savage, Susan Hough and an anonymous reviewer for their critical reviews, which greatly improved our manuscript. We also wish to acknowledge helpful comments from Tom Hanks, Johannes Schweitzer, Leon Teng and Jeen-Hwa Wang.

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August 22, 2023
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