Thursday, January 7, 2010

The World’s Largest Earthquake-Safe Building


The new terminal at Istanbul's Sabiha Gökçen Airport is the world's largest earthquake-safe building. You're looking at the over two million square feet of scaffolding that support it, all resting on top of giant geological roller skates.

Instead of being built on top of the soil, the whole structure rests on over 300 isolators. These giant bearings let the building move laterally during an earthquake. After Istanbul got rocked by a magnitude 7.4 monster in 1999, and another major quake predicted to occur within the next 30 years, you can see why engineers decided to make this massive building shake-resistant.

As terrible as a massive earthquake would be, it would be incredible to see a building this huge move from side to side. Maybe we will in a future "World's Strongest Man" event.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Amazing......

June 23, 2010 at 12:04 PM  

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