Comments on: Overhyped: Is Taipei 101 Causing More Earthquakes?

By: Ny

Ny — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:12:42 +0000

Taipei 101 causes earthquake ?

….maybe the same scaremongers who postulate that co2 causes global warming; I am very skeptical of them all…..These people don’t have a deep knowledge of science.

By: Lord of the Rings - War of the Ring

Lord of the Rings - War of the Ring — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:21:49 +0000

lets put 3 million peaple in there and get them to jump while caring a army back at full load and see if the ground beneef in still holds.
heck that could distroy the earth. as they say you got to be in to win;>

By: Anthony Kendall

Anthony Kendall — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:46:00 +0000

Not sure if the weight of the stuff inside the building was included in that weight. Honestly, the tonnage came from the CNN story and a Wikipedia entry (both agreed), so I am not super confident in those, but I would have to be off by a pretty big margin to reach a different conclusion. The rumor about the engineering library is pretty funny. There are cracks in the hallway around there but I had thought it was just normal settling not sinking due to books!

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:50:00 +0000

I had heard this earlier and thought “whatever.” You are right that the media has a tendency to overhype and react to anything that will sell papers and advertising. (Hurricane Katrina anyone?) Your enginnering calculation seems sound. Does the 700,000 metric ton weight include the stuff inside the building? I remember rumors at MSU that the engineering library was sinking because they forgot to account for the weight of the books.

By: FlyingSinger

FlyingSinger — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:59:00 +0000

I hadn’t heard that, it’s pretty funny. I go to Taiwan a lot and I’ve been to the top of Taipei 101 and saw the engineering presentation and the 800 ton tuned-mass damper system that was built at the bottom and raised to the 89th floor as the floors were constructed. Aside from your plausible back-of-the-envelope pressure calculation, this building received some SERIOUS earthquake engineering by Japanese companies specializing in this. They didn’t just slap this baby up and hope for the best.

I’ll check with my Taiwan contacts on what the local spin is from rational people.

-Bruce