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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.
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.
Think of how a 50kg woman in stilletto heels leaves dents in wood floors where a 90kg man in sneakers doesn't.
This is a boring sig
This would be a good thing IMHO, if the extra pressure realy dose cause an earthquake to happen, it will be causeing one to happen before its build up all its pressure, and that meens more smaller quakes.
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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.
OK, Mister "I-can't-be-bothered-to-spellcheck-my-posts". Whatever. Did it ever occur to you that the definition of "a little pressure" in seismology may be a term of art? That, for instance, a dog house in someone's backyard is what's termed "negligable pressure" or "noise", whereas an entire skyscraper is "a little pressure"?
It strikes me that seismology discusses forces and pressures in terms that are wildly different from normal human experience. Maybe I'm alone, here.
Any time we think that we can really have a big impact on nature, we're proven wrong. We've spent billions of dollars on levees for New Orleans, yet one small category 3 hurricane is all it takes to breech them. We build sea walls to hold back the ocean, yet after one or two powerful storms they disappear with little or no evidence they ever existed. Tsunamis can level entire coastlines.
The notion that a single building can cause earthquakes is totally preposterous. This sounds more like someone trying to justify a grant or raise money than any serious science.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
It doesn't, though. Look at these two posts: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170122 &cid=14176921. That the Taipei tower can count the little observation deck but the Sears tower can't count the antennas makes no sense.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
If it was already on one foot, yes.
/.ers seem to be ignoring the fact that there's an "ancient earthquake fault" (from the Guardian article) already there. The tower is just be reopening an old wound.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
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.
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)
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.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.