Phoenix Trees

Here we are at the Fu Bell on our campus - the bell which reminds students every day to study hard and diligently. So we were just standing in front of it and did not study so hard this day... But hey, we are no students any more! (Which unfortunately does not dismiss us from our responsibilities...) Well anyway, what we actually wanted to show you are these wonderfully flowering trees, which they call here in Chinese "Fèng Huáng Mù" (鳳凰木). This means "phoenix tree" and refers to the bright red blossoms. Feng Huang Mu time for students means exam time - so that is probably why they have planted these trees next to the dunning Fu Bell!?!

Falling Leaves 2

You probably remember our post in January about the falling leaves.
Just today we observed the campus gardeners taking means to prevent such dangerous leave-falling situations. Using a high crane, they lifted one gardener into the crown of the palm trees where he - equipped with a sharp saw - would cut off any old palm fronds and let them fall under "controlled" conditions.

Our little paradise

Hidden behind the beetle nut palm trees and a grey wall, just opposite of our office, lies our little paradise.


If you have a secret look through the punctures in the wall, you can see what we mean!

It is the outdoor swimming pool of our campus! With only few other visitors, this pool offers us the formidable opportunity not only to do some sports, but also to get refreshed from the heat and moisture of Taipei's city climate. (Unfortunately, any other outdoor sport is more or less impossible for us to do - the heat just does not allow any strenuous movements. It is a mystery how the Taiwanese students can play baseball - their favorite!, basketball, volleyball or tennis under the midday sun and high air humidity...)

Modern Monks and Feasting Frogs

Kamil was doing some field work lately. It is often the case that his mind tends to be led astray by different non-professional observations on the way. Outside of Puli, in the very geographic center of Taiwan, he spotted this Buddhistic monk, who was perhaps looking for the way back to his monastery. You can see that this monk is well equipped with 21st century technology.


Later, at night, Kamil could evidence a perhaps rare sight: Beneath a street lantern, thousands of flies and moths were swirling around the cone of light around the lantern. Two clever frogs found out that these flies were very easy prey. It was a nice feast for these two frogs and perhaps the easiest occasion to stuff their bellies since long. On the picture below you see one of the frogs, beholding its delicious prey...

The Giant Vacuum Cleaners

The last 10 days, we enjoyed a very agreeable weather in Taiwan.
We owe this to some giant vacuum cleaners nature provides us with!
In the last days, some typhoons built up over the South China Sea and the Philippines and moved in northeastern direction. Luckily, their wander paths are located some several hundred kilometers to the east of Taiwan. Their anti-clockwise vortices suck enormous amounts of air, thus causing winds blowing from mainland China towards the east. In Taiwan, we therefor enjoy temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius, a constant breeze and air humidity as low as 50%!!! These are like nice summer days in Europe...
For more detailed information, visit the homepage of the Central Weather Bureau (www.cwb.gov.tw) and see under Typhoon news and Observations - Satellite!

A Visit to Austria

The European Geosciences Union Meeting held in Vienna was a perfect occasion to come back to Austria and to visit our families and friends. This meeting offered us the possibility to meet many of our colleagues from Austria and Switzerland and to engage us in networking, as well as to present our data and learn new things.

On the first days, Vienna welcomed us with sunny spring weather, revealing the town's best side. We adored the beautiful buildings, the fresh green in the parks and enjoyed the cafes and the few people in the streets (-if you've experienced Taipei, Vienna seems quite empty in comparison...).
And we also profited from the cultural activities in the Austrian capital, attending a play by Ödön von Horváth in the Volkstheater. We even had our own loge! :-)


Back in Innsbruck, we had to take advantage of the great weather and the even greater snow in the mountains: here are some impressions from the Stubaier Gletscher! It was just awesome!!!


And Nils (the best Telemark-teacher in Switzerland) can be proud of his student - voila: what a sweep, what a drive!


Afterwards, Kamil had the biggest muscle ache ever, but was proud to take it with him to Taiwan!

And then, of course, we saw our sweetest little nice Judith again - with her 6 months, she is the most charming little girl ever! We miss her a lot here in Taiwan! The probably biggest drawback of being here is to miss out on her growing up... Skype is only a modest compensation...

A walk along the Chi Chi rupture

After several weeks in the office, we were glad to get out into the field again. This time, we had a little private excursion along the 1999 Chi Chi earthquake rupture. The Chi Chi earthquake occurred along the Chelungpu fault in western Taiwan in the very early morning of September 21st, 1999, and, with a magnitude of 7.3, it caused severe damage and the loss of over 2400 lives. A formidable memorial museum was created near Taichung, preserving the collapsed buildings and the disruption of the running track of the Kuangfu Junior High School.

As an alarmingly high percentage of school buildings in the area collapsed during the earthquake, Taiwan was incredibly lucky that the shaking happened during the night with the students in their safer homes. (In 2005, Pakistan students were less lucky during the 7.6 Kashmir earthquake, which happened around 9 o'clock in the morning...)

Keeping in mind, what impact the Chi Chi earthquake had on the Taiwanese population, we were nevertheless deeply impressed by the pronounced morphology of the surface rupture and the fantastic opportunity to study active tectonics.

The northern ending of the surface rupture consists of a foldscarp, which moved coseismically. This foldscarp forms a several meters high slope in the landscape. The road, which you can see on the following picture, was flat before the earthquake.

The folding in the landscape can also be traced by looking closely at these beetle nut trees, which grow right on the fold scarp. Their trunks show a knick, indicating their size when they were tilted by the growing fold.


The river Ta-An is cutting across this growing anticline. Its formerly gravel-filled riverbed now shows impressive bedrock incision of more than 15 m! This incision happened in the last 9 years only!

Further to the south, we found an inclined power pole, around which the local government has built a small park. We were wondering if laying out the park probably was less expensive than carefully taking down the pole...


During this trip, I saw my very first pineapple plantation! I did not know that pineapples are growing on small bushes with hard pointy leaves! You never stop learning.



To put it in a nutshell, this excursion was very impressive from what we saw concerning active geology, a bit scary to see nature's forces so vividly, very instructive and also fun!




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And here is the solution to our last posting: Both Janos and "the elephant man" were right, it is the tail of a pachyderm, more precisely that of a rhinoceros! I wonder why they knew this....