Inside Japan’s Earthquake Simulator

The timing of this video is crazy. My thoughts to the people affected by the new years 7.5 earthquake.

Props to all the engineers and architects and workers who built such a cool place. That amount of knowledge in that building is awesome.

This was timely.

A few errors: - confusion between seismograph (the instrument) and seismogram (the recording) - on the magnitude scale, it's not an increase of 1 that represents 10x of the energy of the earthquake. It's actually an increase of 2 on the scale that represents an increase of 1000x of the energy (so an increase of 1 is ~30x)

Imagine telling someone about an earthquake you survived and they were like "It couldn't have been that bad i mean it wasn't a MAJOR earthquake"

They can replay any earthquake?! That’s pretty incredible. What an amazing experiment.

After watching this video, some people may wonder why buildings collapsed due to the recent 1/1 earthquake. The epicenter of the earthquake was in the countryside, an area with many traditional houses and buildings that were built before the current seismic standards were set.

Jan 1 2024 a 7.6 (on the Japanese seismic intensity scale) earthquake hits Noto Peninsula of Ishikawa. Just 150 KM from where it was predicted by semiologists, and reported by the Veritasium team in this video, uploaded 13 days ago. Mind blowing how accurate this was. So far only 1 reported fatality (due to building collapse)

Time and time again human technology amazes me. The fact that people can simulate an earthquake on a 10 story building at that. Feels like science fiction

The pure scale of everything from the engines to the hydraulics is blowing my mind. Looks like the sort of thing you'd see in a steampunk game.

I myself am a survivor of the Kobe earthquake. It was such a traumatic experience for me, even today, a minute earthquake gives me a chill. It is good to see these advances in technology so that we don't have to go through I had to go through back in the day.

The power of Japanese engineering is no joke. In 2011, my father, sister, grandparents, and I lived on the 9th floor of a Japanese apartment building. From our location, the shock was approximately equivalent to a 6.1 magnitude earthquake. Despite this, only one item broke in our house, some unimportant, glass object. No one from our floor was hurt, none of our standing cabinets or dressers had fallen over, and everything that had fallen was easily repositioned. That was the only earthquake that made me feel scared while I lived there. I’m truly grateful for the work these people do to mitigate future disasters.

I worked for 41 years at a testing lab. We owned and operated two earthquake simulators. One with a 10 x 10 foot table and one with a 20 x 20 foot table. The heaviest specimen I ever remembered testing was a 12 cylinder diesel generator, use for emergency power for hospitals in earthquake zones. The generator weighted 65,000 pounds. I've got to witness hundreds of earthquake tests through the years. I'm now retired but was very lucky to have had such a enjoyable and rewarding career.

The timing of this video is uncanny

Its crazy how this video was made 2 weeks prior to a deadly earthquake in Japan.

This video was uploaded in the third week of December 2023. Less than two weeks later, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck Japan on January 1, 2024.

Its crazy that the exact same building that I live has been tested like this. And they showed us the video before we buy it. Kinda scary to imagine being shacked in the building I live rn

I live in the Netherlands, where we have earthquakes due to gas extraction. So my demolished and rebuilt house (along with all other houses in our street) has been placed on base isolation friction sliders. Before we even moved back to the newly built house, there was a quake again and the manufacturer of the friction pendulum sliders has visited again to inspect the sliders. The house (or actually the ground) had moved +/- 2 cm (in X/Y plane) which they could see in the displaced grease in the sliders. The sliders are large enough to allow upto 125 mm displacement from the center in the ground-plane. We have a gap surrounding the house to allow for the displacement, which is covered with some plate and gravel. Here we don't have such 'impressive' magnitudes as the strongest one so far was "only 3.6" on the Richter scale. However quakes elsewhere are several 10s of km down, where we have them near the surface. This makes the quake-movement quite different from what you see in these simulations. So the minimal perceptable magnitude as mentioned in the video does NOT apply to the quakes here as you can feel quakes starting at 1.5 on the Richter scale here because of the epicenter of the quakes here is very close to the surface. Also we have 1km of salt and lots of clay on top acting as a rubber surface. Only a few-1000 houses have to be rebuilt/reinforced to make it all safe again.

I love the quickness and implied obviousness of his response to "how do you predict the earthquakes" with "ask the seismologists", because even though he is an expert in simulating and testing earthquakes, studying how they happen is an entirely different area of professional experience. That's a sure sign that someone is truly intelligent, no speculation, no half-assed answer based on something he sort of knows about, just "ask the experts of course!"

Came here after Japan Earthquake yesterday, That shows us again the importance of this kind of investment & implementation in housing. Interestingly very few houses got destroyed in yesterday's earthquake, that shows Japan is successful in implementing the technology.