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| Istanbul Opens World’s Largest Earthquake-Safe Building Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:16 AM PST The world's largest seismically isolated building, the new international terminal at Istanbul's Sabiha Gökçen Airport, is now complete and open for business. Stretching across more than 2 million square feet, the terminal doesn't sit directly on the soil, but rather on more than 300 isolators, bearings that can move side-to-side during an earthquake. The whole building moves as a single unit, which prevents damage from uneven forces acting on the structure. "What an isolation system does is that it enables the building to move through large displacements in unison, and in doing that, you absorb earthquake energy," said Atila Zekioglu, the engineer at the firm Arup, who designed the building. Earthquakes accelerate buildings laterally, whipping them back and forth. Isolators (see photo below) slow down the motion of the building. In the case of the new terminal, the building will only have to withstand one-fifth of the acceleration that it would have had to without the earthquake proofing. A devastating magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Istanbul on August 17, 1999 killing 17,000 people and causing billions of dollars in property damage. Scientists estimate it's more likely than not that the city will be hit by another large quake in the next 30 years. Istanbul is located near the confluence of the Arabian, African, and Eurasian plates. The North Anatolian Fault runs less than 15 miles south of the city. So, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and a host of other Pacific Rim cities, Istanbul's builders and planners have to take major earthquake precautions.
Luckily, designing structures for that kind of performance has become cheaper and easier. Increased computing enables better simulations of how buildings will act when an earthquake hits. Zekioglu and his team ran their building designs through 14 different simulations of earthquakes. "What we have done over the years is that there are many tests going around the globe in terms of shake tables, testing labs, and what we do is we take that data… test the ability of our seismic simulation software," he said. This software, called Dyna, was originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1970s. It can be used to model what will happen to materials under all kinds of conditions from car crashes to earthquakes to bomb blasts. The software has allowed engineers like Zekioglu to go beyond simply satisfying the building codes to designing buildings that will really meet the objectives of the structure's owners. You don't just want an airport (or a hospital) to stay standing after an earthquake, you want it to be functional. The Istanbul project is quite similar to what was done with the San Francisco Airport's international terminal, said Michael Constantinou, a seismic isolation expert at State University of New York at Buffalo, but it uses a newer kind of seismic isolation device. "This is one of the first projects, at the time they started this thing, to use this advancement," Constantinou said. The new type, triple friction pendulum isolators manufactured by Earthquake Protection Systems in Vallejo, are more compact and can reduce the cost of constructing a building, he said. Many buildings, including three new hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, are now incorporating the new isolators. Constantinou also highlighted a more general advantage that seismically isolated buildings have: They are actually easier to design because it's very difficult to quantify how and why a structure will collapse. "You are designing so that the structure will remain undamaged, and that's much easier to understand," he said. The new terminal is designed to withstand an earthquake as strong as 8.0.
Images: 1) The new terminal/ARUP. 2) Seismic situation near Istanbul/USGS. 3) The triple pendulum slider/ARUP. See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook. |
| Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:14 AM PST
A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge. It's not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One. "A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard," wrote the authors. "All three of these cases were uncovered in this study." The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn't clarify the type of fish they were mongering. Several were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna. Although their results were shocking, exposing sloppy sushi joints wasn't their main goal. The scientists were trying to improve on a new species-identification technique, called DNA barcoding. A coalition of labs has been collecting fish, reading their genes and uploading the information to a database called FISH-BOL. Their goal is to build a catalog of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes. Wildlife officials could use that technology to spot-check fish markets, and fine people who are selling protected species. Right now, the FISH-BOL database is roughly 20 percent complete, but zooligsts can't seem to agree upon the best way to condense the genetic information from each fish into a concise signature. That's where this study comes into play. By checking 14 carefully selected spots on a gene called cox1 and matching them up with the database, the scientists could accurately identify any kind of tuna. Citation: Lowenstein JH, Amato G, Kolokotronis S-O, "The Real maccoyii: Identifying Tuna Sushi with DNA Barcodes – Contrasting Characteristic Attributes and Genetic Distances." PLoS ONE 4, 11, 2009, e7866. Photo: Spicy tuna roll See Also:
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