Leaning Tower of Pisa, 500 year old secret revealed by engineers and soil scientists
Leaning Tower of Pisa, 500 year old secret revealed by engineers and soil scientists
The iconic Tower of Pisa in Italy was made in 12th century and since then it became an object of wonder for people and engineers around the world. The tower was leaning on one side form centuries and looks awfully tilted. And created curiosity in the mind of people and scientists that it has 14,500 tons weight and tilted almost 1 meter for one side but still survived 5 major earthquakes in the region and still standing still. It took 200 years for the construction of this tower.
The tower is now leaning at 5 degree and most of the structure would collapse due to the vulnerability of such structures but not in the case of the tower and it created mystery and amazed many engineers around the globe. Prof. Nuti and co-authors, a team of scientist researched structural information, geotechnical and seismological and suggested that Pisa tower is surviving its weird engineering structure due to a phenomenon is known as dynamic soil-structure interaction.
One of the team member Prof George Mylonakis said in a statement “Ironically, the very same soil that caused the leaning instability and brought the Pisa tower to the verge of collapse can be credited for helping it survive these seismic events,”.
Due to the soft soil which also caused the leaning tower doesn’t reverberate with earthquake ground motion. The combination of the hard structure of tower and soft soil makes it possible. The results will be presented at 16th European Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Greece.