Just days before a team of researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and National Taiwan University set out to conduct fieldwork in the East China Sea, Typhoon Morakot—one of the most destructive storms ever to hit Taiwan—made landfall on the island, causing widespread damage and drastically altering the flow of water along the nearby continental shelf.
The typhoon, which struck in Aug. 2009, caused catastrophic damage in Taiwan, killing several hundred people and dropping up to 2 meters of rain in just 5 days in the mountains. (more…)
Dr. Russ Glenn is a lecturer at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies at Leiden University. He focuses on Chinese politics and international relations. Prior to Leiden he completed his PhD at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He conducted his doctoral work on Chinese energy security needs in a thesis titled: “No Blood for Oil: The strategic implications of increased Chinese oil demand on the Sino-US relationship and the Oil Peace Paradox”, where he broke down the role of oil into the military and economic aspects of supply security, and interrogated the ability of China to successfully achieve oil security. He is particularly interested in military history, Chinese, and East-Asian history, politics, and international relations. Outside of academia he is a contributing analyst at the Wikistrat Consultancy, and has been a keen coach, competitor, and coxswain in rowing for the past 11 years at Cambridge and at Brown, and has also boxed for Cambridge.(more…)