DTM's S. Sacks, A. Linde, N. McWhorter, M. Acierno, B. Schleigh, & Colleagues installing a strainmeter in Taiwan in 2003.

Research presented by Alan Linde, Selwyn Sacks, and colleagues at the 2006 AGU Fall meeting held in San Francisco last week, is featured in a December 15 entry in Nature’s online "Newsblog.” Linde, Sacks, and colleagues placed three strainmeters on the eastern coast of Taiwan in 2003 in an attempt to understand better the extreme deformation rates in the area. The team argues that typhoons passing over the island lower surface pressure and allow the faults there to slip at very high, but slow, aseismic rates. They speculate that these slow earthquakes may have released sufficient strain that there have not been any large, damaging earthquakes in that part of Taiwan for the last 50 years. Sacks commented, “This is a big surprise for us; it’s the kind of finding that is driven by data, not by insight.”