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Taipei 101 changes faultline

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Standing 508 metres (1,667ft) high and at 700,000 tonnes, Taipei 101 is the world’s tallest building. It is also being blamed for having opened a fault because of its weight.

According to the Guardian, a British newspaper, the sheer size of the Taiwan skyscraper has raised concerns that may have far-reaching implications for the construction of other buildings and man-made mega structures. Taipei 101 is thought to have triggered two recent earthquakes because of the stress that it exerts on the ground beneath it.

According to the geologist Cheng Horng Lin, from the National Taiwan Normal University, the stress from the skyscraper may have reopened an ancient earthquake fault. If he is right, then it raises concerns about proposals such as Sky City 1000 in Japan, the vertical city that has been proposed to solve Tokyo’s housing problems. And it is not just skyscrapers that are a problem. Dams and underground waste deposits may also cause rumblings if they become too large. Before the construction of Taipei 101, the Taipei basin was a very stable area with no active earthquake faults at the surface.

However, once Taipei 101 started to rise from the ground, things changed. “The number of earthquakes increased to around two micro-earthquakes per year during the construction period (1997 to 2003).

Other experts are more cautious about blaming the skyscraper for the earthquakes. “A building will change the stress on the ground under the building, but this probably won’t reach down to around 10km, the level where the earthquakes occurred,” says John Vidale, an earthquake expert at the University of California in Los Angeles.

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