7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth (opens in new tab)

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 of earthquakes as a point - talking about epicentres and precise depth is very misleading. Earthquakes are a fault-sheet or wrinkles. Surface fault lines only show where the 3D rips through the solid earth meet the surface. Fault lines matter a bit especially since they indicate local shallowness, but I suspect we get distracted by them because they make spectacular news reports. Reality is complex.

My parents house was right above the fault plane of the Canterbury fault - and their house came though mostly okay. I know lots of people very near the Christchurch quake and many of their houses were unrecoverably damaged.

7.4 @ 300km deep you just yawn and roll over. @10km deep you pray your concrete roof tiles don't come through the ceiling and kill you in your bed... you basically just lie on top of your wife, give thanks for the time you did have, and hope for the best.

[0] https://postimg.cc/HckCRn1m

It started near Hualien City with the magnitude 7.4 and then if you folow the blue lines you can see how it rattled NE-SW mostly along the coast for the first hour (6 events) then following the pink line you can see it popped at the NE end along the coast before a series of events that curved out into the sea to the E-SE for the next hour (5 events). That was followed during the third hour by 4 events oriented roughly NE-SW in green with all but one offshore to the NE. The fourth hour saw 4 more events almost complete the square in yellow. Things were quieting by then and the fifth hour only saw two events, both offshore in light blue with the series ending red with a single event offshore.

I have a graph of activity showing the magnitude and depth versus the time of the event. You can see that the later events trend deeper and lower magnitude making them unlikely to be felt as much as the initial event and less likely to cause as much damage. [1]

[1]https://postimg.cc/zyfdWhNT

To understand the timing of the events I have displayed them in an elapsed time versus magnitude display based on the initial event timing. [2]

[2] https://postimg.cc/68w81VqG

You can see how the magnitude of the events tails off and they become less frequent with time. In the map view you can get a feel for the region's relaxation after the main quake and the other graph allows you to see how the event magnitudes decreased while the later events tended deeper.

And the deeper it is, the further it is away from the ground, where humans are.

Of course transitioning to a new standard would be even more confusing for a while.

Edit: apparently there are many different scales in wide use already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_magnitude_scales

Its incredible what they do in terms of accuracy in a place with so much seismic activity.

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...

Before that, he was looking at a M8 earthquake around 3/13.

And before that, strong tremors around the end of 10/23/2023, seeming later updated to more like 10/25/2023 or 10/28/2023.

None of this panned out.

In general, I'm seeing a lot of misses and no real hits.

It took a bit of work to dig thru the claims he makes. His claims involve planetary alignments serving as a trigger for earthquake activity so that a careful monitoring of those alignments could potentially be useful as a prediction tool. Venus especially when she falls into alignment with outer planets [0], seems to play a large role according to his work.[1]

[0] https://ssgeos.org/articles/planetary-conjunctions-major-ear...

[1] https://ssgeos.org/articles/venus-and-major-earthquakes.htm

It's interesting that he doesn't blame it all on an alignment of the masses of the planets (gravitational trigger) as much as he blames it on electromagnetic forces which he says are stronger and affect the atmosphere during the conjunction. Alrightee.

The twitter post and the youtube video one shouldn't need to waste their time watching are available in the parent comment and in those videos you can find a general prediction. His predictions tend to be slippery. I understand why. The reason is that you need a lot of wiggle room for an earthquake prediction because you will be wrong a lot more than you will ever be close to being right. The key is to flood the market with plausible predictions that statistically have an elevated likelihood of becoming close enough to gain more eyeballs.

The twitter/youtube prediction of note can be found in the nice red box which SnagIt has helped me grab for your edification. [2] It says there will be a series of right angles (conjunctions in his way of looking at the universe) that will set up opportunities for "major seismic activity, potentially peaking mid 7 magnitude around the 30th".

[2] https://postimg.cc/hhCgfdFR

In fact, he updates his predictions as conditions change as you can see in his March 30 update where he gives a 60% likelihood of a 7.0-7.4 quake occurring. [3] Standard procedure is to update when your prediction date passes since by reason and statistics, that means that you're another day closer to it finally coming true. Betting on the inevitable always works if you can spin the calendar far enough ahead without running out of pages.

[3] https://postimg.cc/QF3gBL8W

In earthquake prediction we have to let close be good enough so obviously this is a winner. Just kidding. I decided to take a look at the solar system to see if I could see what he thought he hoped he was seeing. It took me more than one try to find an app that would allow me to unwind the clock back to his setup dates so that I could figure whether any of it made sense.

I found an app called Solar System Scope [4] that allowed me to wind the clock back and forth to watch how it all shakes out up there in the sky and so I SnagIted some screenshots to bracket the relevant days for analysis. I used his prediction to set the bounds as March 27th to April 2nd. Since the quake happened 3 days after his target date I used the 27th as the start and his target as the center date. I hope that makes sense. The next SnagIts show the planetary positions for those three dates and I gave it a good country try to set the time of the SnagIt to the time of the earthquake on each date.

[4] https://postimg.cc/gallery/W36Gxh4

You can see in the Snags that the inner planets Mercury and Venus are rolling around the Sun getting closer to an actual alignment each day that passes and Mars is headed toward that a similar geometry though it is well out of line during those dates. The nearest outer planets Saturn and Jupiter are well out of alignment while Neptune, way the hell out in center field will almost be aligned though it's relative motion will not matter much over such a short time period. Poor Pluto is out of sight to the right and I found Uranus way out in left field in case you still can't find it. Just trying to help.

The most interesting part of this is that all planets except Mercury will be on the far side of the Sun for a few weeks. Mercury, as you can see, will be swinging around the front of the Sun such that by the time we have the total eclipse next week he will be visible to those who have appropriate eye protection in front of the Sun as the Moon eclipses the Sun on the 8th. I SnagIted a shot of that for anyone interested. [5]

[5] https://postimg.cc/vDDK0ytF

Unfortunately I did not get that shot from the exact same perspective as the others since I managed to click somewhere inside that active window and the whole shitteroo shifted on me. I think a reasonable observer can get the idea though that everything is swinging into alignment over the next few weeks and Mercury, like the Moon, will pass directly between the Sun and Earth just like it does regularly, with high predictability.

To me, if his ideas have any merit this might be a better time to predict an earthquake since all this is falling into alignment anyway. The Moon will be passing over Texas and then on up the hill to good ol' New Madrid, Misery, site of one of the most destructive quakes to ever hit North America. It will darken their day for a full two minutes as it passes. With the Moon close by and Mercury's phat mass between us and the Sun while Venus swings to the backside, all we need is a nice coronal mass ejection to provide the electromagnetic pulse needed to kick start the shaker.

Remember though that this method of earthquake prediction doesn't work any better than a rolling, random guess that gets an update every time the previous time window passes without anything of note happening. No one, in my opinion, will predict earthquakes using planetary alignments and end up being right often enough for it to be attributed to skill as opposed to pure shithouse luck. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while applies here to this method all year long, every year.

Notice that his latest update after the Taiwan quake [6] suggests the possibility of magnitude 6-7 quakes in a few days, but those days don't include eclipse day even though the chart on that same page highlights eclipse day alignments. For some unknowable reason though the chart doesn't mention Mercury in the April 8th alignment group. Probably an oversight or maybe he just lost it in the glare of the Sun. [7]

[6] https://postimg.cc/9whCS4DL

[7] https://postimg.cc/zHCKZR0v

Anyway, while I was here and dinking with it anyway I noticed that we were gonna get a much better mass alignment in a few weeks that might be an even better place to predict something so I thought I would "test" my own skills by winding the clock till I made a nice alignment in the skies. I tried to put all the inner planets as close as possible to a kinda straight line and make the moon be close to centered over the Ring of Fire so that region would feel the strongest tidal forces during this alignment and maybe something would shake loose. This is what I came up with. [8] This date has Earth, Mercury, the Sun, and Venus roughly in a kinda-sorta line while Mars and Saturn line up on the hypotenuse of a really long triangle. Jupiter is still on third base and I know where Uranus is too in case you still haven't found it.

[8] https://postimg.cc/hJ80R6vc

Please don't take anything that I have predicted seriously folks. I am not a seismologist. I am a geophysicist and believe it or not, that doesn't automatically mean I am qualified or competent enough to make predictions about anything.

Personally, this is all bullshit of the finest quality. I wonder why I have wasted so much of my life assembling this tonight. I should've been sleeping.

Since one of his most prominent hedges is the electromagnetic hedge (according to his report it isn't alignments that trigger these quakes, it is electromagnetic energy). He states that we can't measure that electromagnetic energy and this is why it is so hard to predict even knowing all about these alignments.

Of course he is ignoring that we have had satellites measuring coronal activity for decades and there are numerous sites on land where we track solar emissions and monitor auroras.

Just visit Spaceweather.com or Spaceweatherlive.com and you can get your fill of useful data about solar activity that could trigger the atmospheric events that he needs for his predictions to work.

Looking back over the period of his prediction there was a geomagnetic storm anticipated in the days following a March 30 sunspot eruption but that storm watch was cancelled. The current watch suggests a disturbance around April 4 which likely will only affect the polar latitudes if it happens. [9]

[9] https://postimg.cc/gallery/mP2hcHD

Anyway. I can't help but conclude that anyone making predictions, myself included, using the methods that this guy claims to employ probably is the blind squirrel finding the nut when one of those predictions gets close to a real event.

Right after the quake saw police and fire dept patrolling around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91Rmacvw4ho

https://youtube.com/v/91Rmacvw4ho

Is that water receding as a form of pre-tsunami?

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.

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

https://maps.app.goo.gl/8cErBHJXBa5ynyVy9

First of all, obviously we have some of the best hardware engineers on the planet, but they all work at TSMC / nvidia and live in Hsinchu so those of us in Taipei never really get to hang out with them.

If you're into it, there's a shitton of cryptocurrency companies and devs out here.

TONS of gamedev companies, especially in the mobile market.

The market is all over the place, we have some really god-tier engineers and then hordes of people building the worst websites on earth in Java / Spring or PHP.

My favorite thing about tech here is the newly formed Ministry of Digital Affairs, headed by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt , who is quite famous in the FOSS world. You can just go to their office during open office hours and have a discussion with them if you want to talk about digital issues, as long as you agree to the conversation being published for anyone to watch.

In line with that is the supremely awesome g0v: https://g0v.tw/intl/en/ Their regular hackathons and slack server constitute an incredible community of tech-associated activists building all sorts of solutions to problems such as fake news (which is a huge problem in Taiwan due to CPC spies / saboteurs), illegal factories, civil defense, etc. If you're in gaoxiong, I highly recommend coming up to Taipei for the next hackathon!

In taipei there's also lots of groups doing regular coworking meetups as well as self-study nights, in English. As for mandarin, I mean, take your pick, every university is chock full of clubs, not to mention meetup.com.

I've been building a software engineering co-op to connect the really skilled english-speaking engineers here with gigs that are befitting their skill level, we're at https://508.dev .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkz6b7Q3dRk

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).