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This study proposes a workflow that enables the accurate identification of earthquake-induced damage zones by using coherence image pairs of the Sentinel-1 satellite before and after an earthquake event. The workflow uses interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) processing to account for coherence variations between coseismic and preseismic image pairs. The coherence difference between two image pairs is useful information to detect specific disasters in a regional-scale area after an earthquake event. To remove background effects such as the atmospheric effect and ordinal surface changes, this study employs the two-step threshold method to develop the coseismic coherence difference (CCD) map for our analyses. Thirty-four Sentinel-1 images between January 2015 and February 2016 were collected to process 30 preseismic image pairs and two coseismic image pairs for assessing multiple types of disasters in Tainan City of southwestern Taiwan, where severe damages were observed after the Meinong earthquake event. The coseismic unwrapping phases were further calculated to estimate the surface displacement in east-west and vertical directions. Results in the CCD map agree well with the observations from post-earthquake field surveys. The workflow can accurately identify earthquake-induced land subsidence and surface displacements, even for areas with insufficient geological data or for areas that had been excluded from the liquefaction potential map. In addition, the CCD details the distribution of building damages and structure failures, which might be useful information for emergency actions applied to regional-scale problems. The conversion of 2D surface displacement reveals the complex behavior of geological activities during the earthquake. In the foothill area of Tainan City, the opposite surface displacements in local areas might be influenced by the axis activities of the Kuanmiao syncline.

Rapid convergence between the Eurasian plate and the Philippine Sea plate in the northern Longitudinal Valley near the city of Hualien in eastern Taiwan has produced prominent fault scarps and large earthquakes (M ≥ 7). This study attempts to more thoroughly understand the surface deformation activities near the faults and their relation to earthquakes near Hualien City using a stable target, multi-temporal radar interferometry method to extract the surface deformation information in this area. Our results indicate that the extracted deformation signals were comparable with those in our leveling data and have a very high spatial density (exceeding 70 point km -2 ). Additionally, all faults in the northern Longitudinal Valley and Hualien City were not deformed monotonically. Rather, deformation time series are complex and frequent activities affected the general trends wherein, for example, 2005 earthquake swarm produced more than 10 mm of displacement near the Milun fault. Moreover, deformation rates in the study area generally ranged from around 10 -20 mm yr -1 of relative displacement rates along the radar line of sight between the western part of Hualien City near the Central Range and the eastern part during the decade, while only the Mingyi fault displayed monotonic fault activities with change of displacement rates of approximately 5 -10 mm yr -1 across the fault.

Mountain building and the rock cycle often involve large vertical crustal motions, but their rates and timescales in unmetamorphosed rocks remain poorly understood. We utilize high-resolution magneto-biostratigraphy and backstripping analysis of marine deposits in an active arc-continent suture zone of eastern Taiwan to document short cycles of vertical crustal oscillations. A basal unconformity formed on Miocene volcanic arc crust in an uplifting forebulge starting ~6 Ma, followed by rapid foredeep subsidence at 2.3–3.2 mm yr−1 (~3.4–0.5 Ma) in response to oceanward-migrating flexural wave. Since ~0.8–0.5 Ma, arc crust has undergone extremely rapid (~9.0–14.4 mm yr−1) uplift to form the modern Coastal Range during transpressional strain. The northern sector may have recently entered another phase of subsidence related to a subduction polarity reversal. These transient vertical crustal motions are under-detected by thermochronologic methods, but are likely characteristic of continental growth by arc accretion over geologic timescales.

We investigated the surface deformation of the northern Taiwan area, including the Taipei basin and its surrounding mountainous areas of the last fifteen years using the ERS-1, ERS-2 and ENVISAT SAR images. Although the Taipei basin now is well developed and amenable to research gathering using the Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) technique, the mountainous areas surrounding the basin are densely covered with various vegetation throughout different seasons inducing high noise ratio in interferograms. Therefore the DInSAR technique is ineffective for observation of surface deformations of these areas. As a result, we developed the Persistent Scatterer (PS) InSAR technique to extract the phase signal of the chosen PS points for this study. Our analysis result shows that the atmospheric disturbance and DEM residual can be successfully reduced and the precise information of surface deformation can be effectively obtained by the PSInSAR technique not only in the basin but also in the mountainous areas. Integrating the DInSAR and PSInSAR results, we observed conspicuous deformation events in northern Taiwan including: (1) the slight uplift in the Western Foothills, the Tatun volcanoes, the Linkou Tableland and the Taoyuan area; (2) the subsidence at the border of the Taipei basin; and (3) relative slight uplift rebound in the center of Taipei basin. The displacements along the Shanchiao, Chinshan, and Kanchiao Faults are large enough to be observed; the Taipei, Hsinchuang, and Nankang Faults are too small and cannot be discerned. Further comparison between the DInSAR, PSInSAR, and their corresponding leveling data shows a very coincidental pattern and measurably improves the authenticity of radar interferometry.