The South China Sea Basin | Jan. 14, 2022

 Why Biden Wants Taiwan/拜登支持台灣的理由

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South China Sea Energy Exploration and Development
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The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates that the South China Sea holds about 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion barrels of oil in proved and probable reserves, most of which lie along the margins of the South China Sea rather than under disputed islets and reefs. The U.S. Geological Survey in 2012 estimated that there could be another 160 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 12 billion barrels of oil undiscovered in the South China Sea. Beijing’s estimates for hydrocarbon resources under the sea are considerably higher but still modest in relation to China’s overall demand—the country’s oil consumption in 2018 is expected to top 12.8 million barrels per day...     more

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US 'sends carrier strike group' to South China Sea

​It comes as the US ramps up pressure on Beijing, laying out its most detailed case yet against 'unlawful' territorial claims

Jan. 14 - The United States has reportedly deployed carrier strike groups for drills in the contested South China Sea as it ramps up its opposition to Beijing’s maritime claims in the region.
The USS Carl Vinson and USS Essex, a Wasp-class Landing Helicopter Dock - along with their escort vessels - entered the southern waters of the sea on Tuesday, said Beijing-based think tank, the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative.

According to the South China Morning Post, the US Navy is expected to conduct joint drills in the strategic international waterways, whose islands, atolls and reefs are subject to territorial disputes between China and several Southeast Asian nations including the Philippines and Vietnam.

The exercises have so far not been confirmed by the United States Navy...

...The South China Sea is rich with oil and gas deposits and is crucial for international shipping. Beijing’s increasing swagger in the region has prompted alarm and a growth in “freedom of navigation” operations by the US and its allies....     quoted from The Telegraph

The South China Sea Enigma
Rasoul Sorkhabi, Ph.D.

The South China Sea, a marginal sea between Asia (the largest continent) and the Pacific (the largest ocean) covers an area of 3.5 million square kilometres and is surrounded by sedimentary basins, some of which have produced petroleum for decades. The oceanic and the stretched continental crusts underlying the South China Sea have experienced a complex tectonic history in Cenozoic times, which geologists are only beginning to unravel.

This article appeared in Vol. 10, No. 1 - 2013

The South China Sea Basin is one of the largest marginal basins in Asia. South China Sea is located to the east of Vietnam, west of Philippines and the Luzon Strait, and north of Borneo. Tectonically, it is surrounded by the Indochina Block on the west, Philippines Sea plate on the east, Yangtze Block to the north. A subduction boundary exists between the Philippines Sea Plate and the Asian Plate. The formation of the South China Sea Basin was closely related with the collision between the Indian Plate and Eurasian Plates. The collision thickened the continental crust and changed the elevation of the topography from the Himalayan orogenic zone to the South China Sea, especially around the Tibetan Plateau. The location of the South China Sea makes it a product of several tectonic events. All the plates around the South China Sea Basin underwent clockwise rotation, subduction and experienced an extrusion process from the early Cenozoic to the Late Miocene.

The geological history can be classified into five tectonic evolutionary stages. (1) rift system development (2) sea floor spreading, (3) subsidence of the South China Sea, (4) closure of the South China Sea Basin and (5) uplift of Taiwan.    quoted from Wikipedia

AUKUS | Jan. 7, 2022

 

乌克兰欲拉北约下“险棋” 俄军将强化大量装备准备抗敌？20220105 |《今日关注》CCTV中文国际​
Jan 6, 2022

Why President Biden Will End Up Giving Putin What He Wants In Ukraine

Nobody in NATO wants Ukraine to join.

 Although strengthening ties with the West is the centerpiece of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s foreign policy, his corrupt and backward country would bring nothing of value to the Atlantic Alliance. Its military is dreadfully underfunded—Kyiv spent less than a billion dollars on weapons last year—and its geopolitical circumstances render it nearly indefensible.

As NATO expanded after the Soviet collapse, the handful of Western members who provide 90% of its funding acquired mutual defense commitments to a dozen Eastern European countries lacking the wherewithal to defend themselves. In the process, it also absorbed a raft of political frictions among new members that make the overall alliance less cohesive. The last thing London and Paris and Washington want today is to add another weak “partner” to their overstretched alliance.     quoted from Forbes

AUKUS (/ˈɔːkəs/, AW-kəs), also styled as Aukus, is a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, announced on 15 September 2021 for the Indo-Pacific region.[1][2] Under the pact, the US and the UK will help Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.[3]


​Why AUKUS is good to keep China at bay in Indo-Pacific

Jan. 7 - ...With the advent of Australian nuclear submarines, the Chinese missile sites on the east coast will be threatened by the sub-surface attack platforms which can stay under water for months together in the South China Sea or the Indo-Pacific. The fact is that the AUKUS is a game-changer for the Indo-Pacific as even the latest AIP diesel submarines must surface, in effect betraying their positions, in weeks for charging their batteries. Thus, from a strategic perspective, the Australian nuclear attack submarines with conventional ballistic missiles as deterrents will allow US aircraft carriers to operate between the Chinese coast and the first island chain and also enforce laws of the seas and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. As China is threatening Taiwan on a daily basis by breaching its air defence identification zone, it is for the US to speed up the SSN production for Australia as time is running out for Taipei and the security of the Indo-Pacific.     quoted from Hindustan Time

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Why Biden Wants Taiwan/拜登支持台灣的理由
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Biden signs annual defense bill suggesting Taiwan RIMPAC invite

Washington, Dec. 27 (CNA) United States President Joe Biden signed an annual defense bill into law Monday with provisions aimed at improving Taiwan's asymmetric capabilities and enhancing defense and security cooperation, including possibly inviting Taiwan to the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC).

Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022, which authorizes US$770 billion in funding for the Defense Department. The bill includes provisions related to Taiwan from section 1246 to 1249, according to the text of the bill released.

The bill asks Washington to continue supporting the "development of capable, ready, and modern defense forces necessary for Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability."

This extends to conducting practical training and military exercises with Taiwan, with 2022's RIMPAC exercise mentioned specifically.

RIMPAC, hosted every two years by the U.S. Pacific Fleet near Hawaii, is the world's largest international maritime military exercise. Taiwan has never been invited to participate in the exercise before.

In addition, the bill calls on the U.S. secretary of defense to perform an annual assessment of matters related to Taiwan, including intelligence matters, Taiwan's asymmetric defensive capabilities, and how defensive shortcomings or vulnerabilities of Taiwan could be mitigated through cooperation.

The bill also recommends that the secretary of defense provide the congressional defense committees with a briefing before Feb. 15, 2022, on the feasibility and advisability of enhanced cooperation between the National Guard and Taiwan.

In response, Taiwan's representative office in the U.S. expressed gratitude to the Biden Administration and the Congress "for their staunch support in ensuring peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the Indo-Pacific region."

The NDAA is the name for each of a series of U.S. federal laws specifying the annual budget and expenditures of the Department of Defense. The first NDAA was passed in 1961.

The authorization bill is the jurisdiction of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee. It determines the agencies responsible for defense, establishes recommended funding levels, and sets the policies under which money will be spent.     source from Focus Taiwan

礦務局簡介（英）
Mar 2, 2012

CPC Corporation (Chinese: 台灣中油; pinyin: Táiwān Zhōngyóu; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-oân Tiong-iû; lit. 'Taiwan Chinese Petroleum') is a state-owned petroleum, natural gas, and gasoline company in Taiwan and is the core of the Taiwanese petrochemicals industry.

台灣中油股份有限公司（英語譯名：CPC Corporation, Taiwan，縮寫為CPC），通稱台灣中油或中油，是臺灣規模最大的石化能源公司，其事業版圖橫跨石油與天然氣的探採、煉製、產品行銷等完整供應鏈。2020年美國雜誌財富世界500大企業評比第409名[5]。

NORTH TAIWAN COAL MINES PT 1: WENSHAN MINE (北部煤礦: 文山礦)

MINING IN TAIWAN
Coal mining on a large scale started in the Japanese era. There are several rich coal seams buried in the mountains of northern Taiwan. Most mines are long tunnels with various smaller tunnels branching off, rather than the open pit style. Some went many kilometers under the mountains. Almost all the mines closed down in the 1980's and 90's, though a couple clung on until the early 2000's. There is still a lot of coal but it's not worth extracting anymore. For a while, many retained their machinery and tracks, but as the price of scrap metal rose a lot of the more accessible mines were stripped and the tunnels were sealed up. Most are located in the Keelung River Valley, Pingxi area, and the Northeast coastal mountains. There are also a number of small mines around south Taipei. 

​While many have been sealed there are some which were impractical to seal, or too remote for anyone to bother. Most of these lie forgotten in deep forests. A minority of others are unexpectedly close to busy public areas. For some of the forest mines visiting has felt like stumbling across an ancient ruin. The following few posts are the results of the first few trips. With a couple of mines I'm going to leave off the exact locations and names, as they have machinery and artifacts in them that could be easily damaged. I will however leave enough clues for those who are interested...     more 

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採礦影音短片（英）
Mar 2, 2012

Australian nuclear-powered sub | Dec. 31, 2021

 

美军大型侦察机抵近侦查约1200架次 数次逼近中国大陆领海！数读2021年美军在中国周边行动记录 20211230 |
《今日亚洲》CCTV中文国际
Dec 31, 2021

Australia to get the first of its nuclear submarines FIVE YEARS ahead of schedule as America fast-tracks $90billion project in face of rising tensions with China

Dec. 30 - Rising tensions with China have fast-tracked the delivery of the first Australian nuclear submarine under the $90billion deal with the USA and the UK.

​Australia now looks set to launch its first nuclear-powered submarine five years ahead of schedule as the West braces for confrontation with China.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton has revealed the UK and US are 'pulling out all the stops' to speed up the massive project.

The controversial deal - which saw Australia abandon its contract with France for a fleet of diesel submarines -  could now see the new subs coming into operation in the first half of the 2030s...     more

Australia warned bid for nuclear subs carries 'enormous' risks

​Dec. 13 - Australia's bid to develop a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines will cost more than US$80 billion and take decades in the "most complex" project the country has ever embarked on, a study released Monday warned.

The report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute -- an influential Canberra-based think tank -- said ownership of the high-tech subs built with US or British know-how would offer a major advantage in deterring aggression from China or elsewhere.

But it will also be a fiendishly difficult task requiring a step-change in Australia's military and industrial capabilities.
It is "probably the largest and most complex endeavour Australia has embarked upon. The challenges, costs and risks will be enormous," the think tank warned.

"It's likely to be at least two decades and tens of billions of dollars in sunk costs before Australia has a useful nuclear-powered military capability."

The project, announced last month, will make Australia the only non-nuclear weapons power to own nuclear-run submarines, which are capable of travelling quickly over long distances carrying long-range missiles and state-of-the-art underwater drones.

Canberra plans to equip them with conventional rather than nuclear weapons. It has yet to decide whether it will buy US or British technology, what class, size and capabilities the subs will have, where they will be built or how radioactive material will be handled.

Even under an optimistic schedule, the first submarines are unlikely to be operational before 2040, according to the report's authors, who include former Australian defence department officials and an expert on nuclear physics...     more

Why Biden Wants Taiwan/拜登支持台灣的理由
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Australia-China relations continued to sour in 2021. What can we expect in 2022?

Dec. 29 - It was another tumultuous year for Australia-China relations in 2021, continuing a trend from 2020.

​The year began with a World Health Organization (WHO)  investigation into the origins of COVID-19, with a delegation sent to Wuhan.

It was something Foreign Minister Marise Payne had called for ahead of other nations, and it made Beijing bristle.

As the year closes out, tensions have taken a sporting turn, with a diplomatic boycott of Beijing's Winter Olympics and speculation swirling around tennis star Peng Shuai.

In between there were other sore points surrounding trade and security: Australia went to the World Trade Organization (WTO) over Chinese tariffs on Australian wine, only for China to lodge its own complaint with the WTO days later.

Ministerial contact between the two nations has apparently been severed, and the ongoing trade tussle has impacted not only wine, but also Australian barley, lobster, beef and coal exports.

Australia also ditched its French submarine deal for AUKUS, a nuclear-powered submarine agreement with the United Kingdom and the United States, in a move widely seen as an attempt to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific.

A poll this year showed that trust in China sank to a record low in Australia, with more than 60 per cent of those surveyed saying they view Beijing as a security threat rather than an economic partner.

Pichamon Yeophantong — from the UNSW Canberra at Australian Defence Force Academy — described the relationship as being in a "death spiral", while ANU researcher Ye Xue said the downward trajectory from 2020 was a "new normal".

However, Jennifer Hsu, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, highlighted that the appointment of a new ambassador to Australia might be the best opportunity to hit the restart button on a rocky path...     more

Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin: tectonicus, from the Ancient Greek: τεκτονικός, lit. 'pertaining to building')[1] is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large of tectonic plates which have been slowly moving since about 3.4 billion years ago.[2] The model builds on the concept of continental drift, an idea developed during the first decades of the 20th century. Plate-tectonics came to be generally accepted by geoscientists after seafloor spreading was validated in the mid to late 1960s.
Earth's lithosphere, which is the rigid outermost shell of a planet (the crust and upper mantle), is broken into seven or eight major plates (depending on how they are defined) and many minor plates. Where the plates meet, their relative motion determines the type of boundary: convergent, divergent, or transform. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation occur along these plate boundaries (or faults). The relative movement of the plates typically ranges from zero to 10 cm annually.[3]
Tectonic plates are composed of the oceanic lithosphere and the thicker continental lithosphere, each topped by its own kind of crust. Along convergent boundaries, the process of subduction, or one plate moving under another, carries the edge of the lower one down into the mantle; the area of material lost is roughly balanced by the formation of new (oceanic) crust along divergent margins by seafloor spreading. In this way, the total geoid surface area of the lithosphere remains constant. This prediction of plate tectonics is also referred to as the conveyor belt principle. Earlier theories, since disproven, proposed gradual shrinking (contraction) or gradual expansion of the globe.[4]

Tectonic plates are able to move because Earth's lithosphere has greater mechanical strength than the underlying asthenosphere. Lateral density variations in the mantle result in convection; that is, the slow creeping motion of Earth's solid mantle. Plate movement is thought to be driven by a combination of the motion of the seafloor away from spreading ridges due to variations in topography (the ridge is a topographic high) and density changes in the crust (density increases as newly-formed crust cools and moves away from the ridge). At subduction zones the relatively cold, dense oceanic crust is "pulled" or sinks down into the mantle over the downward convecting limb of a mantle cell.[5] Another explanation lies in the different forces generated by tidal forces of the Sun and the Moon. The relative importance of each of these factors and their relationship to each other is unclear, and still the subject of much debate.

板块构造论（又稱板块构造假说、板块构造学说或板块构造学，總稱「板塊漂移」）是为了解释大陆漂移现象而发展出的一种地质学理论。该理论认为，地球的岩石圈是由板块拼合而成；现今的全球分为六大板块（1968年法国勒皮雄划分），海洋和陆地的位置是不断变化的。根据这种理论，地球内部构造的最外层分为两部分：外层的岩石圈和内层的软流圈。这种理论基于两种独立的地质观测结果：海底擴張和大陆漂移。

圈可以分為大板塊及小板塊，兩板塊相接觸的部份則可依其相對運動來分為分離板塊邊緣、聚合板塊邊緣及轉形斷層。在板塊邊緣常會出現地震、火山、造山運動及海沟。现今每年的相對運動距離約在0至150 mm不等[1]。
板塊可以分為海洋板塊及較厚的陸地板塊，兩者都有各自的地殼。在聚合板塊邊緣會有隱沒帶，會將板塊沉降至地幔，使岩石圈質量減少，而分離板塊邊緣因海底擴張形成的新地殼，這種對板塊的預測稱為輸送帶原理。較早期的理論認為地球會漸漸膨脹或是漸漸收縮，也都還有一些人支持[2]。

板塊可以移動的原因是因為岩石圈的強度比下方的軟流圈要大，地幔密度的變化造成了地幔對流。一般認為板塊運動是由海底遠離擴張脊的運動（因為地形及地殼的變化，造成地球引力的差異）、阻力及隱沒帶向下的吸力等影響組合而成。另一種解釋則是考慮地球旋轉的受力差異，以及太陽及月亮的潮汐力。這些因素之間的相對重要性及其關係還不清楚，目前也還有許多爭議。