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World's Tallest Building Causing Earthquakes?
IZ Reloaded writes "A geologist thinks that the increase in the number of earthquakes in Taiwan is due to Taipei 101, the world's tallest building. CNN reports: 'Lin said Taipei 101 weighed 700,000 tons and estimated stress from vertical loading on its foundation at 4.7 bars, of which some would be transferred to the earth's upper crust due to extremely soft sedimentary rocks beneath the Taipei basin. If a fault is about to crack, then a little pressure can trigger an earthquake. It's like the last straw that breaks the camel's back.'" More from The Guardian.
Big building causes earthquake, earthquake destroys big building.
I thought the largest building was the pentagon,
Correlation does not imply causation. It's not just a saying: it's the law! :)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Bit of a misleading headline. Taipei 101 may be the world's tallest building (by some definitions), but it's not the largest. The Pentagon is larger by floor area and several buildings are much larger by volume. Wikipedia has more.
This building is small, like asian penises.
Well, the tower isn't what does it, it is the Earthquake Machine stored in the basement (owned by the United States, of course) that is really behind it.
===
I think my statement is only slightly more farfetched.
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If you put enough elephants in one place, you can shift the rotation of the planet!
(This looks like a job for Mythbusters!)
The biggest problem now is finding a way to blame this on the United States.
If a fault is about to crack, then a little pressure can trigger an earthquake. It's like the last straw that breaks the camel's back.'" More from The Guardian.
Well then, the straw that breaks the camel's back can be anything from the sky scrpaer, to a simple dog house in someone's backyward. Looks like the author of the article and headline article are just trying to draw an ironic episode. And since it would be impossible to prove exactly what that straw was, its clearly just speculation.
But did you consider biggest?
Disclaimer: English is not my first language.
By releasing the energy more frequently, this should reduce large earthquakes. Maybe more of these buildings should be built in quake-prone areas.
1) Read story about world's tallest building.
2) Move to Earthquake prone area
3) Put fragile stuff up high
4) File lawsuit
5) ?????
6) Profit!!!!!
...that breaks the camel's back; and thats one hell of a straw!
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
Phew for a moment I thought it was posted under Ask Slashdot ... *wipes sweat*
There has to be a good Godzilla joke in here somewhere...
Why is this on slashdot though?
lol: You see no door there!
The CN Tower is 553 meters. Taipei 101 is a feeble 509 meters.
Whichever it is, they need some kind of cover now. Kudos for getting a bunch of smart so-called scientists together to think of a possible explanation to cover up these operations. 700,000 tons causing an earthquake... how did they come up with that one? They really are geniuses.
If only they decided to use reliable means of disposal instead of frickin' sharks with lasers...
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Google doesn't index signatures, so if you were hoping for added pagerank it ain't gonna work. On the other hand, if you were just hoping another slashdotter would find your sig and inquire, then forget what I just said.
You are being absurd. The fact of the matter is 1) there are more pirates, and 2) there are more earthquakes. Now, it is also a fact that there are more Taipei 101s than previously. However, if you do the math, we went from 0 Taipei 101s to 1 Taipei 101s; yet we went from some positive number of quakes to some greater number of quakes. Let us take T = # towers, Q = # quakes, we get Q = cT. Now clearly if there is no tower, there is no quake, but this does not coincide with reality. However, let P = # pirates, Q = cP. The number of pirates, albeit diminished from their heydey ravaging the Spanish Main, has never reached zero. Neither has the number of quakes.
I think I've proven my point. That, or I need another swig of grog.
Search for "TMD" (tuned mass damper) on this page.
Why would one want to build such a high building in the first place? It is susceptible to an easy destruction; it requires huge amounts of energy for elevators, lifting water, etc. All this is marketing. Trying to sell the city and its businesses. Vanity. Capitalism. Can it cause the earthquake? Of course it can. Not only the building itself, but all those trucks with steel and concrete going forth and back, hammering, etc. Simone de Beauvoir wrote: "If you live long enough, you'll see every victory turn into a defeat". We see now how the victorious capitalism begins to "eat itself", destructing the planet itself. Crash of "communism" was spectacular - revolts, civil wars. The crash of the capitalism will be catastrophic to a much larger scale - the collapse of the Nature, the failure of Earth.
I for one welcome our new skyscraper-dwelling Taiwanese overlords!
What with the load we put on some servers...
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It is like saying an ant could cause an elephant to lose its' balance and fall over.
We humans need to be careful when thumbing our nose at nature... or at the very least making such extreme declarations...
BBC brought the story a day earlier, shorter, no "feet" balast and with a bit more details. In particular they mention that the distance of Tapei 101 to the ancient earthquake fault (inactive for 45,000 years) is 200m, and they also point out that some people doubt that the tower is causing earth quake (not that I want to take sides).
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4493360.s
Taiwan should attack Afghanistan. That would trigger some Al-Queda reactions and those people are good at damaging really tall structures.
So, you think - no sense to play it safe. Indeed why bother - global warming, putting the planet out of balance, - little things...
1) Read story about world's tallest building
2) Move to earthquake prone area
3) Construct really really big and massive building
4) Put fragile stuff up high (like humans)
5) Trigger earthquake
6) Get sued
7) Profit!!!!! (for everyone else)
"A geologist thinks that the increase in the number of earthquakes in Taiwan is due to Taipei 101, the world's tallest building."
Not much of geologist is he. The forces involved in plate tectonics are at least 2 orders of magnitide greater than what we are talking about here. Humans flatter themselves that they have such an influence even on a planetary scale.
"CNN reports: "
Aha, now we're getting somewhere, that very respected scientific journal CNN..
"its foundation at 4.7 bars"
Are you having a laugh? We are talking infinitesimal scales of geological pressure here!
"would be transferred to the earth's upper crust due to extremely soft sedimentary rocks beneath the Taipei basin."
The force will be transferred whether there are hard rocks, soft rocks, or wensleydale cheese beneath the building.
I think some slashdot ed has been tickled again.
Turner Construction a US company, did much of the construction in its role as "project and construction manager for the assignment".
You didn't think they'd build such a building without the experience of US firms, did you?
In the article is says it weighs 700,000 tons, when it actually a a weighs 800,000 tons (read the facts).
...I told them that building had bad Feng Shui.
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Flapping butterfly wings cause Hurricane.
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Bush launches mass pesticide attack, in retalliation for Hurricane Katrina.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
And do only pirates who say "arrrrrrg" count here?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
We should test out this theory by building super tall buildings on beds of extremely soft sedimentary rocks in other areas.
From the little I remember from my geophysic lessons, a "point pressure" like this for sure resembles would in "normal crust" cause threee points of major pressure (in the 2D model), that is right below the point of pressure and then points certain distance where the crust "bulps back up" from the pressure. That is what I have learned has happened with the alps and that is proposed to cause some of the seismisity in the meditarrian in areas where there, according to plate-theory alone, should not be much activity.
... probably only useable for teaching and not truly useable in the real world.
So I guess I would also look for these earthquakes that would have the same distance to the tower. But, the alps and a tower, that is two very diffrent scales.
I do recall a professor telling me that the alps and molehill would have the same effect. But, that was a very simplified theory, that did not take a lot of things into account
Thinking about it the distance to the other two points of "extra pressure" might be smaller than the uncertainty of finding the position of the earthquake, with such relatively small earthquakes described in the article (4 Richter)
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This is called induced seismicity, and I really would be surprised if a mere 700,000 tons could trigger it. It's a real problem with dams and the enormous weight of water in their reservoirs, and no doubt keeps the project managers of the Three Gorges Dam awake at night (the dam is built on a fault line).
Perhaps, if the space elevator was on the top of it, there would be a force cancellation
"New research says no, they can't." FG
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that this fact is true: "Taipei 101 is triggering earthquakes".
Some posts immediatly labeled this fact as a negative consequence; citing one line, Often, there are unintended negative consequences to what we do no matter how good the planning is. Actually, this is not the case.
Taipei lies on the western boundary of the Philippine Sea plate; as the plates move, they accumulate energy on the boundary. Lin Cheng-horng wrote that Taipei 101 may be triggering many sismic events of magnitude 2.0 to 3.8. So this micro earthquakes are releasing energy. If Taipei 101 was not there, then this energy would accomulate to a point where a massive earthquake would occur. The more energy is released in small sismic events, the less will appear in a large earthquake (capable of destroying houses and killing people).
So, the aforementioned fact is a positive consequence.
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The next time you see a fat person walking around just prior to an earthquake, make sure you get their name so you can sue them for causing the earthquake.
Might as well get the name of your local preacher too so you can sue god while you're at it.
Heh, that's funny! How about ants? Any funny stories on them? :)
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If it turns out to be true they may regret naming it like it was designed by first year engineering students "101"
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The article states that the micro quakes have been on the rise since the they started constructing the building.
Now I dunno about you, but I seriously doubt that the tower weighed 700,000 tons from the moment they poured the concrete foundations, which more than likely means the micro quakes simply coincided with the beginning of construction, independant of any outside human activity.
If the quakes increased in number as the building progressed, then it could be possible.
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this ...
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
The geological features of active areas are ones humans have found it very desirable to live near. I'll go ahead and intuit that our short lifespans are a contributing factor. So yeah, there's at least one hidden variable.
And someone is looking for ideas to blame this on the USA. The 1985 James Bond flick A View to a Kill came up with this idea of pumping water from a lake into a fault (with a Nuke - obsession of most Bond villains with Nukes) elsewhere close to the San Diego fault to destroy Silicon Valley. There is a little scientific salt in this idea, pumping fluid (although not in small quantities) into an existing fault could initiate seismic activity. Now someone says a single sky scraper can do this with just 700,000 tonnes. Other than becoming an idea for some B-grade movie, I don't see any useful implication here. The global weather cycle is interesting, El Nino seems to be delivering lesser heat this year and there's lots more interesting changes happening. Indonesia for all the quakes has about 76 active volcanoes, the highest for a single nation. So no one was correlating recent seismic and volcanic activity with the point that Indonesia was on its way to attempt to construct the world's tallest building. Now some Taiwanese scientists have the luxury to think about tall buildings and link them to possible impending earthquakes. This is a wake up call for the real scientists, before these people start naming it the "Tower of Babel" effect. Scientific news in the media and magazines are really lacking. Popular Science reports in media is almost always a publicity stunt.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
There are tons of bad sci-fi movies about man-made, or at least man-caused, seismic activity.
This is a little bit of a spoiler, but for a little different take, check out Jonathan Franzen's novel "Strong Motion" and get extra English Lit. points for reading a real author.
What, less than 5 bars in a multistory building? Where does one go for a quite ale or two without all the crowds?
It's called chaos theory. Some times very tiny microscopic events (think of the building at the scale of earth crust) may have huge unbelievable consequences.
It's not about a building creating an earthquake from scratch, it's that the building may manage to build up enough pressure to become the last small stuff that will break the fragile equilibrium in a crust tension that was just about to unleash a earth quake no matter what and just waited this small last push.
If it wasn't the building maybe, something else will be the trigger, some volcano explosion, whatever,
There's a difference between a huge event being able to completly fuck up an established stable situation, and the trigger that makes a metastable fall appart like it was just about to do.
Like cited by the entry (don't even need to RTFA) : It's like the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
Or like we say in french : The last droplet of water that makes the vase overflow.
Most of the unplanned negative consequences are usually due to small side effect that were neglected but that can, through strange chain of events lead to incredible consequences.
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"I don't know if it's just coincidence or if they are related," he said. "It's very hard to prove this scientifically, but it's just as hard to disprove it."
What the fuck kind of scientist is this dude?
This guy is an idiot. But hey, his title ends in 'ist' so he must have a point, right?
An entire downtown core could exert enough pressure to impact something. Pressure at any one point must be spread out and dampened. Rather than finger a single buildign they should look at the building density in the area.
p.s. i have no geology training.
- Density of really light rock: ~ 1.2 tons/cubic meter
- Assume "supporting area" around the building: 1000 meters square
- Assume "supporting depth" of tectonic plate: 10km meters deep
- Volume of: 10^10 cubic meters
- Weight of that area around the building: 1.2 x 10^10 tons
- Building, fraction thereof: 0.00055
As a real rough calculation, the weight of the building is negligible.So just how do the builders/engineers propose to truely fix this?
Continental plates that are under a land/water border get loaded and unloaded several times a day with more mass than all the builings than mankind has ever built. The weight of this tower is not even noise.
You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you... god damn you all to helllllllll!
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
...earthquake causes building.
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Hmmmm....
Go examine nature around Chernobyl or various other radioactive places in Russia and around the world.
Go look at the immediate upstream areas around any large dams (and downstream ones after they collapse).
Go look at the effects of a hundred years of poor farming practices in what used to be fertile areas.
Go look at the effects of oil spills.
Go look at the world's coral reefs.
Go look for the huge whale population.
Go look for the enormous fish populations in the Grand Banks.
Go get a clue.
The notion that we can do something to trigger earthquakes (with a building no less) stretches credibility, but that hardly justifies saying that we don't affect "nature". Perhaps your statement would have been more effective if you'd say "we can't affect plate tectonics", but even then there is going to be the rare case where the conditions are just right. You can remove bricks from the levy, and eventually one of them will cause it to fail.
Your examples merely demonstrate that nature* can have a large impact on us whatever we do. But you're assuming the converse is true--that therefore we cannot have any impact on nature no matter what we do. That does not logically follow. Nature is incredibly diverse; there is little to no connection between hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and earthquakes in Thailand. You might as well be saying "I can't break this boulder with my hammer, therefore we'll never cause a species to go extinct."
More specifically, if you believe human activity cannot affect seismic activity, I encourage you to read up on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal fluid injection study. In fact, here's a good overview of the various ways in which humans affect seismic activity.
*And don't get be started on this word, which is fraught with interpretative baggage. Remember that scientifically we are part of nature too, so it's not a question of "humanity" affecting "nature," but rather one aspect of nature affecting another.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I like how you used the levees as an example of natures surpemacy. Really how stupid we can be. The levees from what I remember were well within specs for meeting the disaster. The only problem is that there was a canal that amplified the storm surge and basically broke the levees. No canal no levee breach.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Okay, this is off-topic, but the topic is pretty stupid anyhow, so...
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I must say, I find the standards for "tallest building" to be completely arbitrary, to say the least. I think moronic would be more appropriate.
I consider the Sears Tower to be the tallest by every rational measure. The Petronas Towers were considered taller only because the, err, "spire", simply met the standard for being part of the "structure", rather than being an antenna.
The Taipei 101 is taller than the Sears Tower because it has a tiny little observation-type deck up on it's spire. It's slightly higher than the highest floor of the Sears Tower, although not really a floor. That is in addition to the previous spire/antenna issue.
In addition, the Sears Tower has 110 floors, while the Taipei 101 only has 101 (hence the name). And no, the floors aren't any smaller...
Wikipedia has a very good illustration of their relative heights. After seeing it, I think most everyone will agree that the Sears Tower is taller in every rational measurement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyscrapercomp
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Microsoft to get more business in this taipei building is beginning a new get the fact story. They asked the land owner of the tour to compare the effect of the tour with the effect of the basketball team when they dunk. They sea that the basketballer are causing this problem and will be marketed on a lot of banner everywhere on the net.
Perhaps he's a Christian scientist. How many times have you heard a Christian argue, "You can't disprove the existence of God, can you? You don't have infinite knowledge, do you?"
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Next we will hear this, "Fat arsed american caused the latest earthquake in california when he fell out of his SUV and increased the pressure on the earths crust"
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lmao
As someone will probably note, yes the water is being lifted by other solor bodies, but do to the inertial resistance to flow, it does change the load on tectonic plates.
When we were tunneling for the 3rd water tunnel, the rock was hitting 16,000psi - 20,000psi, if I remember correct. That's so hard that it's unbelievable.
Many people believed that the sold rock substrata was largely responsible for the legendary acoustics of the original Carnegie Hall [widely believed to have produced the most beautiful sound of any concert hall ever built].
Sadly, though, there is widespread agreement among old-timers that the acoustics were permanently ruined by the 1986 "renovation". [Or at least there was widespread agreement amongst old-timers back in 1986; now, almost 20 years later, there are precious few NYers who possess a living memory of e.g. Toscanini conducting in the old, pre-renovation hall].
good post, overall (i agree w/ it). just a small metaphor nit: coastlines are by definition already level (they are where the "altitude above sea-level" is zero). of course, you meant the human artifacts built upon those coasts, i understand...
I wonder how many of the Captain Obviouses responding here have heard of scare quotes.
I grew up in Leadville, Colorado. Just up the canyon was a pair of angry, grumpy old miners whose hobby mine had collapsed during an earthquake. In a Monty Python-esque manner, they rebuilt it and it collapsed again during an earthquake, and they realized that it was exactly one month after the first collapse. They rebuilt it AGAIN and it collapsed again during an earthquake... one month later. So they started tracking earthquakes. One or more small earthquakes each month, like clockwork. Other people were doing the same thing, and finally tracked it to Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which was dumping wastes (according to rumor, tens of tons of nerve gas) by injecting them into a 5000 meter deep well. Let me make that clear: they were pumping some of the deadliest toxins known into the ground, and causing earthquakes. How messed-up is that? Here's a page about other deep injection-caused earthquakes. A number of geologists have made the case that we should start doing this on purpose to trigger small earthquakes and relieve the fault line strain that later produces a big earthquake, but the liability concerns for suits from injuries received in a small, intentional earthquake are too great. I think John McPhee talked about this in his book "The Control Of Nature." If he didn't, he should have.
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Well, if earthquakes don't work, then mothernature will surely find another way. Check this thread out. Sinking or flooding are possibilities too!
Reminds me of the fabulous furry freak brothers comic, "witness! that by putting 10 postage stamps into a parking meter, you can freeze time forever!"
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From emporis.com (http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=100765), section facts:
"Most aspects of the design, layout and planning are consulted by a Feng Shui master."
Although it doesn't say that they took his advice, so... What do I know.
"of which some would be transferred to the earth's upper crust"
I would have thought all of the load would be transferred to the Earth's upper crust. Otherwise some of the building is defying gravity.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Those who deserve to sacrifice history are neither condemned to repeat security nor the freedom to know.- George Franklin
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E plebnista . .
$META_SIG_JOKE
Geez, it was only a joke. Get a sense of humour. Please don't read things into an innocuous comment that isn't there.
Obviously my comment struck a nerve with the one who modded down the comment. Sheesh.
and a few mL of greasecan make the tallest man sliptrip the fuck over.... a bug no bigger than the widthof the human hair can kill you... a few kg's of plutonium and other yummy ingredients can make a 20km fireball... asteroid vs the world... see the pattern?
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
Titties of Mass Distraction?
Knew a coed or two with those..