In general, Toronto is a relatively easy place to build underground. Our glacial history left the city with stiff clayey soil and our earthquakes are small and infrequent. The soil is forgiving when excavating and has low permeability, meaning excavations can be made dry (a very big deal when working underground). But the same glacial loads that left the city with this forgiving soil created strange and interesting rock conditions. When you excavate into the shale bedrock underlying Toronto, it swells and squeezes. If you take a sample of Toronto’s shale bedrock out of the ground you can watch and measure it as it increases in volume; the sample actually gets bigger. If you build a tunnel or a basement in squeezing rock without taking the proper precautions, it will be slowly crushed. This would be of concern for deep constructions, underground arcologies and tunnels and the like. How would this be detected beforehand? Colony planners would do well to suss out the underlying geologies of their locations. Heres a question: What impact might this sort of phenomenon have on non-garden worlds? Would the sudden hydration associated with an outpost on a Mars-like colony produce comparable issues?
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 22:41:07 +0000
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