Semiconductor History | 九二一地震教育園區, 霧峰 — The Running Track That Kept the Record

光復國中 in 霧峰 had a running track, and on 21 September 1999 the 車籠埔 fault came up through the middle of it. The track did not crack so much as ride upward, one half lifted clear above the other, the painted lane markings still running across the break. Taiwan decided not to repair it. The school was rebuilt elsewhere and the ruined campus became 九二一地震教育園區, operated by 國立自然科學博物館, with a tensile canopy raised over the track so the scarp stays exactly where it stopped. The surface rupture ran about 85 kilometres, and that number is why this site belongs in a chip history rather than only a geological one. An 85-kilometre break across central Taiwan crossed roads, rivers, a dam, and the transmission corridor carrying power from the island's southern generating stations to its northern factories. 新竹科學園區 sits 105 kilometres north of the epicentre and took almost no structural damage that night. Its fabs stopped because this ground moved, and because the wires that fed them ran across it. Seismologists give the event a moment magnitude of 7.6 to 7.7; Taiwan's own measurement was 芮氏規模 7.3. Both are correct readings of different quantities, and sources that pick one and call the other wrong are mixing up scales. The shaking lasted around 102 seconds. 2,415 people were killed and more than 11,000 injured, and an industry's lost wafers sit a long way down the list of what that night cost. The park is open to visitors, and the buckled track is what people remember. The thing to notice standing at the canopy is the mismatch in scale: a displacement you could climb over using one hand, and a semiconductor industry 105 kilometres away that could not run for the better part of a week because of it. Photo: Iv0202, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.