JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

In the previous article we made some references to some of the most important skyscrapers in the world and how they are the tool to achieve our deepest aspiration and reach the sky.

Along history, and with the support of engineering and architecture development, we have managed to conquer the sky, but also the deepest points on earth. We have built structures of nearly one kilometer but also managed to build cities labyrinthine networks under our feet, and buildings that extend downwards into the earth.

HIGHER THAN SKYSCRAPERS

Every time I have the chance to talk about skyscrapers and high rise architecture and engineering constructions, I challenge my students with the same question. “Which and where is the highest building on Earth?”

Most of the students would think about Burj Khalifa. The most proud Chinese would still dream about the 632-meter-high Shanghai Tower.

Some more thoughtful students would start thinking about the difference between high and tall.

In fact, the highest building on Earth, should be somewhere in the town of La Rinconada, In Peru, an old gold-mining camp in the remote Peruvian Andes that has grown to ‘major city’ status. Over 50,000 people live in this mountainous city at an altitude of 5,100m. It lays claim to the title of the ‘highest city in the world’ and hosts the Highest building on Earth.

La Rinconada, Peru - Source Coyotitos.com

As a curious fact about altitude, some 140 million people live permanently at high altitudes above 2,500 m in the Himalayas in Asia, the Andes in South America and the Ethiopian Highlands in Africa.

It is in those places where we would be able to find the highest constructions on Earth: it happened with La Rinonada, Here are the seven highest cities and settlements in the world, each of which is located above 3048 m in elevation.

Going on with curious facts, we could also find the lowest construction over referenced to the sea level. Focusing on cities, there is a bunch of places below the sea level, such as Jericho (-258m), Tiberias (-207m) or Bet She’an (-120m) all in Israel.

As we are always looking to beat ourselves, we can always go deeper.

DWELLING UNDERGROUND

In a recent Design Studio Exercise, the students were challenged with the idea of creating a city underground without any digging or drilling works, just taking advantage of the existing holes, tunnels and underground structures under our feet.

Presentation Axonometry - Sineenart Suptanon

If we could have the chance to have a brief glance of what is going on underground, some of us would get socked to see how Earth Crust is becoming a hollow cheese until some day we will find our cities floating.

It began in 1863 when The London Underground first opened as an "underground railway". It became an electrified line in 1890 making it the world's oldest metro system.

From that moment, the idea of digging tunnels became popular. In December 2017, there were 178 cities in 56 countries around the world hosting around 180 metro systems, 40 of them located in China. Among them, Beijing Subway is the world's busiest and longest metro system, while the New York City Subway has the greatest number of stations,

Picadilly Circus Metro Station – Source: the Londoner.com

And among all these178 cities in 56 countries, Kiev is the one that locates the deepest underground metro station in the world, sitting 105m under the city, far from London’s deepest station, Hampstead at -58m, or New York’s 191st Street Station, with 55 m below the street level.

Arsenalna Metro Station - Source TravelBlogEurope,com

As deep as the Statue of Liberty, it takes 5 minutes to travel on an escalator to get to the surface at this station. The station’s depth is due to the city geography and the constant changes of levels between the Dnieper River bank and the hills.

DIGING DEEPER AND DEEPER

Apart from metro tunnels and city infrastructures, underground structures are slowly becoming the part of the cities’ cores, solving transport infrastructure problems and making urban life more comfortable.

Underground Build-up – Source: Singapore SGSME

Since our ancestor’s lives in caves, humans are familiar with using underground spaces. Being the lack of light the main downside for many human activities, building downwards can create secure, safe and of course unobserved spaces, from underground bunkers to building parking basements.

Traditionally it has been the underground parking construction the most popular construction. Especially in Asia, it has been a construction prerequisite due to the lack of land and the land cost.

In Europe, he deepest underground parking is Leiden parking in the Netherlands, with 22 metres deep, equivalent to a7-storey-building. 

In China, a Hangzhou city underground parking has 12 levels underground, 40 metres deep.

Sydney Opera House:

Among the public buildings, the most famous building is the Sydney Opera House. It could be considered the deepest basement in the world, putting the building complex in the ranking of the deepest buildings on earth in a big doughnut-shaped cave.

Sydney Opera Model - Source Undergroundexpert.info

Sydney Opera House’s car park extends 12 storeys into the earth, at 37 metres under the surface level, and has a capacity of 1100 cars, This extraordinary excavation involved removing some 130,000m3 of sandstone and was completed in April 1992.

Super Deep Crust Holes:

Apart from all the deepest known buildings and constructions in the world, humans have gone deeper. In South Africa the world’s deepest mine extends more than 4Km into the earth.

But it is in Russia where humans have reached the deepest point on Earth. Located at 12,2 km deep the "Kola Superdeep Borehole" in Russia is the deepest artificial point on Earth.

Kola Superdeep Borehole - Source Absolute Knowledge

Engineers started drilling in the Kola Peninsula, in the far northwest of Russia, in 1971. In 1979, they broke the world depth record held by the Bertha Rogers hole in Oklahoma, at 9,583 meters, reaching the12,000 meters in 1983. Engineers hoped to reach 15,000m by 1993, but the temperature of 180 oC was much higher than equipment could resist, making not feasible to keep digging deeper.

Another super-deep drilling project was set in Bavaria in 1990, reaching a depth of 9,101 meters. As it happened in the Kola Superdeep Borehole, this German Deep Drilling Programme found extremely high temperatures of more than 260 °C, with rocks flowing in a liquid state due to the temperature and pressure conditions. 

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

The last century has been the rise of the underground laboratories constructions. As the book, first published in 1864 and reissued in 1867, our civilisation seems to be involved in a compulsive search to find a passage to the centre of the Earth. That passage was finally found in the fiction book via Sn?fell in Iceland. And as it is commonly said, reality is always more exciting than fiction.

The deepest buildings in the world are in fact all research laboratories. These structures are built deep into the earth’s crust to enable experiments to take place in conditions with extremely low levels of background radiation.

The China Jinping Underground Laboratory:

The deepest of these impressive constructions is the Jinping Underground Laboratory, located under a mountain at the depth of 2.4 km in Szechuan Province in western China – the equivalent of 3 Burj Khaifa buildings stacked on top of one another.

Jinping Underground Laboratory – Source: houserenovationsinlondon.co.uk

Completed in 2010, this laboratory is a perfect location to perform low background neutrino physics research and investigate dark matter. The entrance to the lab is not the vertical one but horizontal, to make the entrance easier from the mountain.

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

This underground laboratory is located at the depth of 2.1 km in Canada. Initially used as a nickel mining site, it was adapted and finished in 1999. At the deepest point, 2Km from the surface, there is a unique room with 22m of diameter, used as a laboratory.

SNO Site - Source Queens University

Neutrino Research Center in The Andes

This laboratory was expected to be opened in 2020. With a depth of about 1,750 metres, the Andes Underground Laboratory is using the Agua Negra Tunnel, that crosses from Argentina to Chile and will be the first deep underground laboratory in the southern hemisphere, providing the international community with a unique site for testing dark-matter modulation signals. The site furthermore has also a low nuclear reactor neutrino background and is of special interest to the geophysics sciences.

Large Hadron Collider, France - Switzerland

Although not the deepest, these installations are probable the world’s most impressive underground structure. Constructed 175 m below the surface in the border of France and Switzerland, this place hosts the Large Hadron Collider built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.

Large Hadron Collider, France - Source Firstpost.com

The construction was completed in the year 2008, with a 27km-long structure that has became the world’s largest single machine and the most powerful particle accelerator. Built underground to shield it from background radiation, the collider was designed to explore what happened immediately after the Big Bang.

DEEPEST BUILDINGS ON EARTH

Apart from metro tunnels, parking and research laboratories, the main challenge for underground construction has always been the lack of light and the scarce chance for ventilation. Not being the deepest constructions, those permanently hosting people are the most challenging constructions.

The Deep Pit Hotelin Shanghai:

This construction China is considered the deepest building for people use and stay, although it is not completely buried and does not need to struggle with the lack of light and ventilation factors. Initially using and old quarry, the 18-storey InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland Hotel is located in the district of Songjiang, has been in development for 12 years and had a final cost of 2 billion Yuan (US$287.9 million).

Deep Pit Hotelin Shanghai – Source: Archinect.com

Of its 18 floors, just two are above-ground while the two lowest are completely submerged by a lake that occupies the remainder of the vast quarry pit. The hotel has 336 luxury rooms.

Gj?vik olympic cavern hall, Norway

The Gj?vik Olympic Cavern Hall was built for the 1994 Winter Olympics, where it was hosting 16 ice hockey matches. With an audience capacity of 5,500 and buried 55m beneath the mountain, this building is the world's largest underground auditorium.

With this underground construction, developers had the main goal of not taking up valuable downtown lands and interfere in the mountain landscape. The underground condition also created a stable temperature, reducing the heating and cooling cost.

Gj?vik olympic cavern hall - Source Tunnel Talk

The excavation for the arena included140,000 cubic meters of rock that were removed in over 29,000 truckloads. For the blasting of the rocks 170 tonnes of dynamite were needed.