Why does Taiwan have so many earthquakes?
Taiwan shakes often because it sits on a collision: one tectonic plate is being pushed into another at about eight centimetres a year, and the island itself is the crumple zone.
The 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake: what happened and what it changed
In the early hours of 21 September 1999, the Chelungpu fault in central Taiwan ruptured along about 100 kilometres. The Chi-Chi earthquake killed thousands, damaged buildings as far away as Taipei and left seismologists with the richest set of strong-motion records ever gathered from a major earthquake.
Typhoon or hurricane? How typhoons near Taiwan get their names
A typhoon and a hurricane are the same phenomenon: a strong tropical cyclone. Only the ocean differs. In the western North Pacific, names come from a shared list of 140, but Taiwan’s weather service identifies each typhoon first by a number.