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Abstract: On April 3, 2024, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake, known as the 2024 Hualien Earthquake, struck offshore Hualien, Taiwan, at a depth of 15.5 km. Overall, the negative societal impacts were limited, despite varying levels of impact to the infrastructure, including power outages affecting over 308,000 households, landslides obstructing roads, bridge collapses, and railway deformations. Taiwan’s fast recovery is credited to its robust earthquake preparedness and disaster mitigation strategies. Given this event’s strong potential to generate new knowledge, StEER considered activating its standard Level 1 response. However, upon consulting with colleagues in the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), StEER opted to instead play a supporting role to NCREE efforts already locally documenting the event, and an official response page was instituted at the StEER website to house any products generated by this collaboration. NCREE’s rapid access to the affected area enabled a unique form of Preliminary Virtual Reconnaissance Report (PVRR) that included both data from third-party sources and from the NCREE-field-collected data. 

A modified atomic force microscope is used to probe activation effects that may accelerate reactions in a ball mill.