World's Largest Earthquake Shake Test

clipped from www.youtube.com Quake Simulation to Bring Safer Homes A 40-second experiment in the Japanese city of Miki involves a seven-story wooden building placed on the world's largest shake table, and measuring its movements as its exposed to a 7.5 magnitude quake. clipped from www.nsf.gov The final experiment of NSF's multi-year NEESWood project, the effort tested new ways to construct buildings that can withstand severe forces of nature. After repairs, on July 14th, the six-story wood-frame structure became the subject of the largest shake table test the world has seen to date: six stories, all-wood construction, shaken to motions from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, amplified to a level that equates to an event that occurs, on average, once every 2,500 years. clipped from www.strongtie.com World's Largest Earthquake Shake Table Test in Japan clipped from www.strongtie.com clipped from www.strongtie.com clipped from www.strongtie.com clipped from www.strongtie.com clipped from www.youtube.com

Sources:

1. YouTube - Quake Simulation to Bring Safer Homes
2. Home - Standing Strong: 2009 NEESWood Capstone Test
3. World's Largest Earthquake Shake Table Test in Japan
4. YouTube - World's Largest Earthquake Shake Test in Japan

Related:

1. Simpson Strong-Tie - Helping to Build Stronger, Safer Structures
2. NEES | George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation
3. YouTube - Earthquake Test
4. Massive Fake Quake Shakes 6-Story Condo | Wired Science | Wired.com
5. Would You Like to Destroy this 6-Story Condo With an Earthquake? - Earthquake simulator - Gizmodo

Doomsday Vault Protects Seeds of Life

A doomsday vault built to withstand an earthquake or nuclear strike is ready for operation deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain, where it will protect millions of seeds from man-made and natural disasters

clipped from green.yahoo.com Biodiversity 'doomsday vault' comes to life in Arctic LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (AFP) - Aimed at providing mankind with a Noah's Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe, an Arctic "doomsday vault" filled with samples of the world's most important seeds will be inaugurated here Tuesday. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Nobel Peace Prize winning environmentalist Wangari Matai will be among the personalities present at the inauguration of the vault, which has been carved into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, just some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole. Graphic on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, designed to preserve crop diversity in case of large-scale catastrophe, in advance of its inauguration on February 26.(AFP) "The facility is built to hold twice as many varieties of agricultural crops as we think exist," explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and project mastermind.