Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Typhoon Morakot

Recently, an immense typhoon moved towards taiwan. It's been already predicted previously the tragedy, and many people moved out before the storm began. But people who haven't fled yet may have hard time surviving the heavy rain. Anyways, there were some very intense floodings, serious mudslidesand landslides. There are more than 500 hundred victims and many more missing, and with wind packing 89mph (143 kph) threatening the entire lsland to soak. Typhoon Morakot is also the worst typhoon happened in 50 years, which explains the significant increase of the rainfall in such short time and the victims that it had.



Up: An infrared view of landslides happening in the valley of geysers.

Landslides happen when the stability of a slope gets unstable by a heavy rain, snowmelt, or an earthquake. When high levels of ground water flow through a cracked suface of a mountain, it may seperate the rocks and mud from the ground and cause a massive slide which is called, Landslide. When these slides get really serious, it can also create a megatsunami, which usually go up for more that a hundred meters high. Also, once when a person is trapped in any kind of landslides, he/she won't be able to breathe because there are no oxygen in the mud and eventually will cause death. This will be also one of the biggest problem people are having in taiwan.



Now here is a satellite view of the typhoon Morakot. You can easliy notice the eye, and just witness how big it is. This typhoon should be moving upwards, which means it may threaten countries like Japan, Korea, or China. But those countries may not have much problems as taiwanese do, because it's landscape is flat, unlike taiwan that has tall mountains surrounding, which makes the water to stay in place instead of speading out. However, countries like taiwan tends to prepare well for typhoons. So let's see what kinds of solutions taiwan have.


4 comments:

Michael said...

Young Hee you did a great job with the raw material of typhoon Morokat. It is well written with description and voice. What's missing is the addressing of our two learning goals. 1) how the environment itself contributes to disasters, and 2) how people living in the environment can impact the amount of damage is done. We will come back to these issues, and at that time write about them directly.

Brandon said...

Hey good write up on typhoon Morakat,but I thing you made a few grammar errors on your write up. I think you really organized your blog and your write up really well!! You also did a great job on explaing about the main point which is Typhoon Morakat!!!

Yong Hee Lee said...

Thanks for the comments. I will try to do better next time without any grammer mistakes and not to miss out the essentials. :D

Yong Hee Lee said...

I edited the essentials. How does it look now?