Taipei, Sept. 21 (CNA) Taiwan plans to introduce six more offshore seismic monitoring stations, bringing the number of underwater stations to nine by 2020, Kuo Kai-wen, director of the The Central Weather Bureau's Seismology Center, said Thursday.
The bureau has accelerated expansion of its seismic activity monitoring network in recent years by adding more offshore stations to better gather seismic data, according to Kuo.
After determining that 70 percent of earthquakes around Taiwan originate off the northeast coast, the bureau established the country's first underwater seismic monitoring station off Yilan in northeastern Taiwan in 2011. However, its operations were suspended in 2014 after underwater power lines were damaged by a fishing trawler, Kuo said.
The bureau took the opportunity provided when repairing the underwater lines, to install two additional earthquake monitoring stations in the area. Test runs at the new stations started earlier this year and they are scheduled to come online in October, according to Kuo.
Two of these three stations are located in the Heping Sea Basin and one in the Nan'ao Basin.
Six more underwater monitoring stations will be added off eastern Taiwan and located in the Ryukyu Trench, a 1398-km long oceanic trench between northeastern Taiwan and southwestern Japan.
He said the number of stations in Taiwan will reach nine by 2020, greatly improving the country's ability to detect tremors and tsunamis off the northeast coast.
Kuo made the statement as the country marked the 18th anniversary of the 921 earthquake in 1999, which measured 7.3 on the Richter scale and claimed 2,415 lives.
