Three types of modern submarine canyons on the tectonically active continental margin offshore southwestern Taiwan

Species and Functional Diversity of Deep-Sea Nematodes in a High Energy Submarine Canyon

“…The collision between the Luzon Volcanic Arc and the South China Sea margin created the Taiwan central mountain belt, foreland shelf and slope, and Manila Trench, which significantly affects the geomorphology of GPSC (Liu et al, 2016). The head of GPSC is deeply incised into the continental shelf (i.e., vertical relief >400 meters, Figure 1) with a clear bathymetric connection to a small mountain river, the Gaoping River (Chiang et al, 2020). The canyon head is believed to have formed by subaerial erosion; the head later submerged during the Holocene transgression following the last glacial maximum (∼18,000 years BP) and then was re-excavated by sediment movement processes (Yu et al, 1991).…”

“…These environmental variations may replace (or filter) the poorly fitted species with the better-fitted one to cause a gradual, continued species turnover along the length of the continental margin (McClain and Rex, 2015). Moreover, the physical disturbances by bottom currents, turbidity and debris flows may contribute to the heterogeneity of the canyon seafloor (Liu et al, 2016;Chiang et al, 2020) and thus drive the bathymetric variation in species composition (Zeppilli et al, 2016(Zeppilli et al, , 2018. In the GPSC, we found that the selective deposit feeding (1A) and K-selection species tend to increase toward the deeper depth strata, providing some indirect evidence of decreasing physical disturbance toward the deeper canyon.…”

Historical Tsunamis of Taiwan in the Eighteenth Century: the 1781 Jiateng Harbor Flooding and 1782 Tsunami Event

“…In addition to the analysis method, tsunami scenarios the were performed with Cornell Multigrid Coupled Tsunami Model (COMCOT) (Liu et al, 1998;Wang and Power, 2011) for the purpose of examining tsunamis effects on the coastal regions of Taiwan. Tsunamis caused by SMFs were designed referring to the results of IIA method and previous researches through the submarine morphology of Taiwan (Chen et al, 2018;Chiang and Yu, 2006;Chiang et al, 2020;Hsu et al, 2018;Liu et al, 1993;Su et al, 2018). Since having a reasonable initial free-surface elevation for the source is crucial, the amplitudes of SMF tsunamis (Table 2) were obtained by the length and thickness of the mass failure along with the local water depth and slope (Watts et al, 2005)…”

Morphological Significance and Relation of Ecosystems of Submarine Canyons off SW Taiwan

“…Along this active margin, the shelf-slope region is structurally dominated by folds, faults, and mud diapirs formed by younger compressions adjacent to the Taiwan Mountain Belt (Figure 2). Diapiric intrusions and thrust faults influence not only the direction but also the intensity of incision and morphology of these canyons [24,25]. The island of Taiwan is active geologically, as it formed on a complex convergent boundary between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Plate to the west and east, respectively.…”

“…Bathymetric chart showing the five submarine canyons and the geological diversity of landscapes along the SW Taiwan margin with a relatively narrow shelf but a broad and topographically irregular slope (data from [22,23,25]). Sergestid shrimp are distributed between the head of Kaoping Canyon and the head of Fangliao Canyon [27].…”