Chapter 8 Chapter 8 Survival

1.tremor of heaven and earth The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was once an Orthodox church, made of marble and covered with mosaic inlays.It is difficult to see what supports its huge dome structure.With a diameter of 100 feet, it is only slightly smaller than the dome of the Pantheon in ancient Rome, but it is much taller.Its design is quite innovative, and the arched window colonnade at the bottom shares the weight of the large dome, making it appear to be floating.Staring straight up at the gilded dome 185 feet above your head, it's hard not to be intimidated, leaving the onlooker half-doubted by the miracle and a little dizzy on the other.

Over the course of a millennium, reinforced interior walls, additional semi-dome structures, flying buttresses, vaults, and large decorative piers further shared the weight of the dome, according to Turkish civil engineer Matt Soansen, even after a major earthquake It's also hard to shake the Hagia Sophia.The church was completed in AD 537, and the first dome of the church was destroyed in an earthquake 20 years later.The catastrophe led to reinforcement works; nevertheless, earthquakes severely damaged the church (which became a mosque in 1453) twice until Mima Sinan, the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire, rebuilt it in the sixteenth century. repair.The exquisite minarets added to the church's exterior by the Ottoman Empire would one day crumble, but even in a world without humans, where masons would not come to regularly reinstall the stucco of Hagia Sophia, Soansen considers it to be the same as other ancient and beautiful buildings in Istanbul. The great masonry edifice must survive intact into future geological periods.

It's a bit regretful that he didn't say much more about the city where he was born.This is not because the city is static.In history, Istanbul was originally called Constantinople, and earlier it was called Byzantium. The regime of this city has changed hands several times. It is hard to imagine what else can bring about great changes to it, let alone destroying it. possible.But Matt Thoranson is convinced that, with or without humans, the former has already happened, and the latter is approaching.In a world without humans, the only difference would be: no one would pick up the pieces of Istanbul anymore.

Dr. Soansen, a professor in the Department of Structural Engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, first left Turkey in 1952 for graduate study in the United States.Istanbul at this time had a population of only 1 million.Half a century later, that number was 15 million.He believes that in the process from the Turkish Empire to the Turkish Republic, this point is compared with the previous changes in religious beliefs - from the belief in the Delphi oracle to Roman civilization, to the Byzantine Orthodox Church, and then to the Catholicism brought by the Crusades, Finally to Muslims - a much bigger shift.

Dr. Thoransen sees all this change through the eyes of an engineer.While previous powerful civilizations had erected to themselves majestic monuments such as the Hagia Sophia and the nearby Blue Mosque, the growth of the population was expressed architecturally as more than a million multi-storey buildings simultaneously squeezed into Istanbul's narrow in the street—a house destined to die, he said. In 2005, Soansen and his international team of experts in architecture and seismology warned the Turkish government that within three decades, the North Anatolia Fault, east of the city, would move quietly.If an earthquake occurs, at least 50,000 apartments will collapse.

He's still waiting for a response, though he thinks people may not believe what experts think is going to happen. In September 1985, the U.S. government hastily transferred Soansen back to Mexico City to analyze how its embassy could withstand a magnitude 8.1 earthquake that brought down nearly a thousand buildings.The structurally reinforced embassy building was intact in the quake, and he inspected it just a year before the quake.But on Reforma Avenue and its nearby streets, many tall office buildings, apartments and hotels have collapsed. This kind of earthquake is really rare in the history of Latin America. "But this earthquake basically only affected the urban area. But what happened in Mexico City is simply not comparable to what is going to happen in Istanbul."

These two disasters, one in the past and the other in the future, have something in common: almost all the buildings that collapsed were built after World War II.Turkey did not take part in the war, but its economy suffered like everyone else's.As Europe's economy took off after the war and industry revived, tens of thousands of farmers flocked to the cities in search of work.Istanbul straddles the Bosphorus, and Europeans and Asians on both sides fill the six or seven-story reinforced concrete residential buildings. "But the strength of concrete," Matt Soansen told the Turkish government, "is only one-tenth that of Chicago concrete. The strength and quality of concrete depends on the amount of cement used."

The problem at the time was that the economy was bad and concrete was hard to come by.But Istanbul's population is growing, and the problem is getting worse, as floors are built higher and higher to accommodate the larger population. "The success of a concrete or stone building," explains Thoransen, "is the pressure on the first floor. The higher the storey, the heavier the building." Adding residential buildings on top of a mall or restaurant structure — This is where the danger lies.Most of these buildings are open-plan commercial areas with no internal columns or load-bearing walls, as they are supposed to have only one floor.

Further complicating matters is the fact that extra floors rarely fit in with the original building after the fact.Worse, people leave a gap at the top of the wall for ventilation or to save material, Soanson said.As the building shook in the quake, some of the supporting columns of the walls snapped.In Turkey, such hidden dangers exist in countless schools.From the Caribbean to Latin America, from India to Indonesia, as long as there is no air conditioning in tropical areas, people usually rely on ventilation to drive away the heat.Even in developed countries, the same hazard is often found in structures that are not air-conditioned, such as garages.

In the 21st century, more than half of the people live in cities, and most of them are not rich.People use all sorts of cheap reinforced concrete every day: rows of cheap buildings all over the world will crumble when humans are gone, even faster if cities happen to be on the edge of a fault.The narrow, winding streets of Istanbul will be clogged with rubble from countless wrecked buildings, and Thoransen estimates that much of the city will not be able to be dredged for three decades, until the gigantic debris is cleared. Of course, the premise is that there are still cleaning staff there.If not, and if Istanbul's snowpack is left unattended each winter, cycles of freezing and melting will fragment most earthquakes into the sand and soil above cobblestones and sidewalks.Every earthquake breeds fire; without firefighters, the grand wooden buildings of the Ottoman Empire along the Bosporus would be reduced to ashes, like cedar, to form new soil.

Although the mosque and Hagia Sophia's domes survived the damage initially, seismic waves would loosen their structures, and alternating cycles of freezing and melting would crack the stucco, and eventually bricks and stones would fall.Just like the 4,000-year-old Troy, 175 miles from the coast of the Aegean Sea in Turkey, only the roofless temple walls in Istanbul still stand—yes, they still stand, but they have been buried in the soil. 2.land The metro system planned by the city of Istanbul includes a line linking Europe and Asia under the Bosphorus.If the metro tracks hadn't passed through any faults, if Istanbul had survived until the day it was completed, the system might have survived long after the surface city had disappeared, albeit long forgotten. (Subways built near geological faults, such as the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system and the New York subway system, will see different fates.) In Ankara, Turkey's capital, the heart of the subway system has sprawled into a vast underground shopping district , with mosaic-style walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic bulletin board systems and stone arcades—compared to the noisy streets above, the underground is orderly. Ankara has underground malls; Moscow's subway, with its deep tunnels, chandelier-decorated, museum-like underground stations, has a reputation as the most tasteful place in the city; Montreal's underground malls, shopping centers, offices, apartments, subways Labyrinthine passageways to older buildings above ground—these subterranean systems will be the most enduring man-made edifices, and they will still be here long after the human race is gone.Although seepage and surface subsidence will eventually affect above-ground structures that are exposed to the elements, their fate is better than that of underground structures. These are not the oldest regions.Cappadocia, a three-hour drive from Ankara, is located in the east-central part of Turkey and literally means "the land of fine horses".But the name must be wrong: it must have had a more fitting name before, in some ancient language, but it got its name because of a confusion of pronunciation, because even winged pegasus couldn't Steal the character of the land—let alone the subterranean. * In 1963, James Milat, an archaeologist at the University of London, discovered a mural landscape in Turkey, which is now considered the oldest mural landscape in the world.Eight or nine thousand years ago, this is also the oldest work drawn by humans on walls (walls made of mud and bricks).The eight-foot-wide two-dimensional mural depicts an erupting twin-cone volcano.The content of this picture is meaningless if you leave the context of the incident: the volcano, painted with ocher-colored damp plaster paint, could also be mistaken for an air sac, or even breasts that have been separated from the body— If the latter, then it should be the teat of the female cheetah, because there are black spots on it inexplicably.The volcano looks like it's placed directly on top of a stack of boxes. However, judging by the place where the mural was found, its meaning is unmistakable.The twin-peaked volcano's shape follows the contours of the 10,700-foot Mount Hassan, forty miles to the east, on the high Konya plain in central Turkey.In addition, the "box" refers to the houses of the original town, which many scholars believe is the earliest city in the world: it is twice the age of the Egyptian pyramids, and its population at that time reached 10,000, compared with the same period. Jericho is much more lively. When Meerat began excavating, all that remained of the city were low mounds amid wheat and barley fields.He initially found hundreds of deposits of obsidian, which would explain the black spots, and Hassan Volcano is the source of this ore.For some reason, Catalan Mound was abandoned by people. In the "box" house, the walls made of mud and bricks collapsed by themselves, and the rectangular outline of the "box" has a soft curvature under the action of corrosion.Nine thousand years from now, the arc will flatten again. But on the other side of Mount Hassan, something very different happened.The region known today as Cappadocia began as a lake.Over millions of years, the volcano has erupted frequently, depositing layers of ash into the lake hundreds of feet deep.When the "cauldron" finally cooled, the ash condensed into tuff -- a resource-rich rock. The last major eruption two million years ago lifted the lava bed, laying a thin crust of basalt over 10,000 square miles of powdery tuff ash.After cooling and hardening, the climate turned bad.Frost, rain, and snow came, and the cycle of freezing and melting fractured the basalt crust, allowing water vapor to seep in and dissolve the tuff below.As the erosion intensified, the surface began to collapse.What remains are hundreds of small, grayish-white, slender pinnacles covered by layers of dark basalt. Tourism industry promoters call them "Fairy Towers," a name that sounds sweet but isn't the first thing that comes to people's minds.Still, the somewhat mystical name survives, because it wasn't just wind and water erosion that shaped the surrounding tuff hills, but imaginative humans too.Not as many towns in Cappadocia are built on the ground as in the tuff hills. The tuff is so soft that a determined prisoner can escape with a spoon.However, tuff hardens when exposed to air, forming a smooth, stucco-like crust.By 700 BC, humans used iron tools to dig holes in the cliffs of Cappadocia, and even hollowed out the "Fairy Tower".Like a prairie dog's penchant for burrowing around, it didn't take long for holes to be carved into the face of every rock—some big enough for pigeons, others for people, and still others for three layers big hotel. Innumerable pigeonholes had been carved into the walls and hills.The purpose of these pigeonholes is to attract feral pigeons and get their nutritious droppings, but now people in the city want to drive them away because of the pigeon droppings problem.Pigeon droppings are so valuable that they are used here to fertilize grapes, potatoes and the famous sweet apricots, so many dovecotes are as ornately carved as the cave churches of Cappadocia.This homage to the pigeon was reflected in the architecture and continued until the advent of artificial fertilizers in the 1950s.With fertilizers, Cappadocians stopped building pigeon coops. (They don’t build churches anymore either. Before the Turkish Empire converted the religion of the Turks to Islam, there were more than 700 churches built on the plateaus and mountainsides of Cappadocia.) Today, the most expensive estates here are family homes hewn in tuff, with bas-reliefs on the exterior (as eye-catching as any mansion anywhere else), and matching skylight and mountain scenery.Former churches have been converted into mosques; the muezzin summons believers to nightly prayers, and the smooth tuff walls and spiers of Cappadocia resonate as if the mountains were praying believers. In some distant day all these man-made caves, even those of natural origin, much stronger than volcanic tuff, will disappear.In Cappadocia, however, the human mark will be longer than in other regions, because here the humans not only settled in the walls of the plateau, but also lived under the plains.deep underground.If the poles of the earth changed, and a layer of glaciers swept across the middle of Turkey one day, sweeping away all human structures in its way, only the surface would be destroyed here. No one knows exactly how many underground cities exist in Cappadocia.We have now discovered eight cities and many small villages, but there are doubtless many more.The largest one is called Delin Valley Underground City, which was discovered in 1965: One day a resident was cleaning the secret room of the cave. He broke a wall and found a room behind him that he had never seen before. Then there was another... Finally, the cave archaeologists discovered a labyrinth of connected rooms at least eighteen stories underground, 280 feet above the surface, enough to hold thirty thousand people, and many more to come Excavated monuments.There was a tunnel big enough for three to walk side by side, connecting another subterranean town six miles away.Other passages suggest that at some point all of Cappadocia—both above and below ground—was covered in a hidden transport network.Many people still use these ancient tunnels as cellars and storerooms. The earliest part is the closest to the surface, which is a principle of the formation of the valley.Some believe that the earliest builders of the tunnels were the Hittites in biblical times,18 who burrowed underground to escape Phrygian raiders.Murad Ertugrul Gurya, an archaeologist at the Nevsehhi Museum in Cappadocia, agrees with the view that the Hitti lived here, but is concerned that they were the first to come here People in life are skeptical. Proud to be a local, Gurya has a beard as thick as a Turkish rug.He worked on the excavation of the Asikli mound.The Asikli Mound is a small mound in Cappadocia that contains human remains buried even earlier than the Catal Mound.The site contains 10,000-year-old stone axes and obsidian tools capable of cutting tuff. "These subterranean cities are prehistoric," he declared.This, he says, explains why the rooms on the upper floor appear rough compared to the precise rectangular floor below. "The human beings that appeared later lived deeper and deeper." They seem to be out of control, as each generation of civilization realizes the benefits of a sheltered subterranean life.Gurya found that torches lit the underground cities, but more often linseed oil lamps—which also met the lighting needs while maintaining a pleasant temperature.Warmth may have been what drove the first humans to dig burrows for the winter.However, as the Hittites, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Seljuk Turks and Christians successively discovered these cave dwellings, they carried out widening and deepening projects, the main purpose of which is to defense.Eventually the Seljuk Turks and Christians even expanded the original upper rooms enough to keep their horses underground. Cappadocia smells of tuff—clean, earthy and minty, a scent that intensifies underground.Tuff is highly malleable, allowing holes to be dug wherever lights are needed; but it is also so tough that Turkey considered using these underground cities as air-raid shelters if the Gulf War in 1990 expanded. In the dungeon of Drin Vale, there are livestock feed boxes on the ground of the stables.The next floor is the public kitchen, with a hole in the nine-foot ceiling, and the pottery stove is placed under this hole-through the rock passage, people exhaust the kitchen fumes two kilometers away, and the enemy also It was impossible to determine where they were hiding.The air ducts are also skewed in design for the same reason. Huge storage spaces and tens of thousands of earthenware urns suggest that millions of people lived underground for months in the dark.Through the vertical information exchange channel, they can talk to people in any stratum.Underground wells provided them with water, and underground drains kept water from flooding.Some of the water flows through tuff pipes to underground winemaking and beer brewing sites - here are the fermentation tanks made of tuff and the grinding wheels made of basalt. Walking between different levels, climbing on low, narrow, winding stairs (any intruders will have to slow down and walk one by one, but if the intruders do get here, they can easily will be killed one by one) - this can lead to claustrophobia.And these drinks are likely to play an important role in reducing the symptoms of claustrophobia.The stairs and ramps have landings every ten meters, with Stone Age "cabinet doors" (half-ton, floor-to-ceiling stone carts) that can be rolled up to seal off a passage.Sandwiched between two cabinet doors, it doesn't take long for intruders to realize that what's above their heads isn't an air duct, but a pipe for pouring hot oil over them. The next three floors of this underground fortress is a room with a vaulted ceiling, and the stools all face a lecture platform-this is a school.Below that are several floors of residential areas.Subterranean streets that fork and criss-cross span several square kilometers; residential areas line them up, including extra-wide closets for parents with children, and even rec rooms—a dark passageway inside. Turned around and returned to the original point. The next floor is the eighth basement of Delin Valley, where two large rooms with high ceilings meet-this is the church.Although the long-term humidity made it impossible to leave murals or other paintings here, Christians who migrated from Antioch and Palestine in the seventh century may have prayed in this church to escape the Arab invaders. Below this level is a small square room.It had been a makeshift burial place where the dead could be temporarily deposited until the danger passed.As the Dungeon of Derlin Valley and other underground cities are occupied by another new civilization, the residents here will always return to the surface and let the corpses of their own people rest in the ground-only on the surface, food can be in the sun and Grow in the rain. The surface is where they were born and died, but someday after we are gone, the underground cities they built for protection will defend the traces of human existence.They will be the last testimonies of what we have ever lived here.