Taipei  - A Japanese company will help Taiwan build the island's first undersea earthquake monitoring station, the Central News Agency (CNA) said on Sunday.

NEC Corp of Japan won the contract to build the station off Taiwan's northeast coast, which can cut the time of reporting an earthquake by 10 seconds, CNA quoted Shin Tzay-chyn, director of the Central Weather Bureau, as saying.

The station, costing 400 million Taiwan dollars (12 million US dollars), will be built 45 kilometres off Toucheng, at between 2,000 to 3,000 metres below sea level.

Taiwan sits on the circum-Pacific seismic belt and experiences about 18,500 earthquakes each year. Of these, only some 1,000 quakes can be felt.

Most of Taiwan's earthquakes occur off the east coast, caused by the friction between the Philippine Plate and the Eurasian Plate.

The most recent major quake struck Taichung County, central Taiwan, on September 21, 1999.

The magnitude-7.3 quake killed 2,400 people and injured more than 10,000.

Taiwan's Seismological Observation Centre currently relies on its on-land observation stations for realtime data on earthquakes.

The centre can measure an earthquakes' magnitude no sooner than 18 seconds after the quake begins. Measuring the magnitude and sending out the warning takes at least 30 seconds.  (dpa)