By Warren Cornwall
For the past year, Tara Hutchinson has been trying to figure out what will happen to a tall building made from thin steel beams when “the big one” hits.
To do that, she has erected a six-story tower that rises like a lime-green finger from atop a shrub-covered hill on the outskirts of San Diego, California. Hundreds of strain gauges and accelerometers fill the building, so sensitive they can detect wind gusts pressing against the walls. Now, Hutchinson just needs an earthquake.
In most of the world, this would be a problem. Even here, where a major fault runs right through downtown, the last quake of any note struck 6 years ago and was centered in nearby Mexico. But Hutchinson, a structural engineering professor at the University of California (UC), San Diego, doesn’t need plate tectonics to cooperate. This summer she has an appointment at one of the world’s biggest earthquake machines.
This device—a sort of bull ride for buildings—is one in a network built around the United States over the past 15 years to advance natural disaster science with more realistic and sophisticated tests. Costing more than $280 million, the National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative has enabled scientists to better imitate some of the most powerful and destructive forces on Earth, including earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides.