Alessandro Rotta Loria, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Assistant Professor
Posted on 07/11/2023 6:48:44 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
As the planet heats up due to global warming over much of the past century, so have spaces underneath the Loop. That’s a cause for concern around the impact on buildings, new research from Northwestern University finds — though it also presents an opportunity to reuse that heat.
Building basements, the subway system, parking garages and other below-ground areas generate a lot of heat. That combined with warmer air on the surface has made for a significantly hotter underground, something old cities across the world experience.
So Alessandro Rotta Loria, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, decided to find out how hot it gets under Chicago’s Loop, how that affects the soil and what that means in terms of potential damage to building foundations. After setting up more than 150 temperature sensors in underground downtown spaces, he found wide variations.
“The undisturbed ground temperature in the Chicago area is about 52 degrees Fahrenheit,” Rotta Loria said in an interview. “In the heart of the Loop, we measured a ground temperature exceeding 70 degrees. In some underground structures, we measured more than 97 degrees.”
He called those hottest areas “significant drivers” of “underground climate change.” That excessive heat causes layers of soil to expand or contract and the ground to swell. Building foundations slowly sink as a result.
Next, Rotta Loria created computer models to look at how this will continue to affect buildings and other structures over the next 30 years.
“The ground is deforming,” Rotta Loria said. “No existing civil structure or infrastructure is designed to withstand these variations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at chicago.suntimes.com ...
Alessandro Rotta Loria, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Assistant Professor
Climate Change - Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
ROFL
Yes, yes....
But did he forget to look under his bed?
(Great Evil may lurk there!)
Oh for God’s sake. Underground climate change?! Stop with this shit already.
/sarc
Climate Change has turned downtown Chicago, LA, Oakland, SF, Portland, etc into toxic waste sites.
Research: Climate change linked to climate change
The underground temperature “issues” such as they are, if they are, have to do with the extent of underground infrastructure in places where underground infrastructure is significant, as in large cities. That has not changed one iota due to “climate change”.
Wow, they don’t even finish the first sentence without bs. At least try to lure us in.
Wow this is crazy stuff. Underground in Chicago you have billions of rats. You have furnaces and electric wires as well as tunnels and a very high water table equal to the lake and river surface. There is no evidence that the weather above is doing anything to the temps below. Nor is there evidence that the temps below are anything more than how close the the thermometer is to a heated basement or the furnace or electrical wire or sewage.
The loop does not have a single park. There is no exposed ground. Its covered with cement 100%. Water surrounds three sides of the loop. While trains come in to three major train stations and the L runs both over and under the Loop. All Utilities run underground, including electric, water and sewer. And the “ground Level” starts about two stories above the river shore line because the streets have leveled off the area at its highest point. So ground is in some places five stories below the street. If temps are changing down there, the weather is the last thing I would suspect as a cause.
Underground in Chicago bkmk
The large amount of hot lead being dispensed above ground has contributed greatly to the warming of Chicago.
Gotta take the focus off Pedo Joe's treason and corruption.
He’s there for the chicks.
I think it will even cure itself if we leave it alone.
“Is There Anything It Can’t Do?”
Apparently, it can’t do any good thing. The proof of that is that if you reported a good thing due to Climate Change, your government funding would be cut off, which would be a bad thing.
The article mentions one ancient building with some unusual readings and not much else.
Before the Arab oil embargo of 1973, it was not cost-effective to insulate some types of heating systems.
My hundred-year-old house had ZERO insulation when purchased, we quickly corrected it. Also, the local utility had a fair price on a full energy audit for our house.
Interestingly the main heat loss was from the basement walls and floor! Once upon a time, it was believed that heat loss into the surrounding earth would stabilize at a minimum number... Before WWII UofI did disprovided this BS.
That said, it would have been nice to see the numbers, at different distances from the building, and basements in downtown Chicago are below lake level, what type of dewatering system is used if any, the effect of water migration,...
Thank you for posting, perhaps the researchers have published their work.
“I’m worried about how Climate Change is affecting the moon and the other planets in the solar system.”
I think their was an article on global warming on Mars.
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