Underground heat is shifting Chicago’s foundations
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The phenomenon seems to present both challenges and opportunities. Vertical ground displacement can stress building foundations and load-bearing structure components, not necessarily leading to building collapse or anything, but cracks, operational failure, excessive repair costs. On the other hand, capturing the waste heat could actually be fed back into the system to directly heat other buildings without needing to draw from the energy grid, so with more appropriate foundation designs, this phenomenon could actually be purely a good thing.
The study here also publishes its code and data, by the way, so feel free to play around with it.
I think it's unfortunate, but indicative of the incentives created by an upvote-based commenting system that the top comment here for a while was a person who picked out a single sentence and derailed the discussion within three minutes of the link being posted (I'm sure they read the whole article before doing that). Kinda shame on the New York Times for wording it that way, "scientists have taken to calling it." This study was published by one author and he's a civil engineer. Googling this phrase doesn't indicate anyone else I can ever find using it.
This happens all the time. The article about autonomous vehicle crashes skyrocketing, the top comment was "they're skyrocketing because they started looking for them, they weren't before" and someone pointed out that this was in fact addressed in the article within the first few paragraphs.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engine...
https://gizmodo.com/chicago-was-raised-more-than-4-feet-in-t...
From [0] : “Construction of the John Hancock Center began in 1965; however, was stopped in 1967 because the building kept sinking. Because of the John Hancock Center's lakeside location, 57 concrete caissons had to be sunk into 10 ft wide holes drilled 197-feet below grade into bedrock, resulting in the John Hancock Center having the deepest foundation of any building at the time.”
[0] - https://www.beck-technology.com/blog/how-did-they-build-that...
For instance the space needle is just on a giant hunk of concrete that is only 30ft deep. https://www.spaceneedle.com/history#:~:text=An%20underground....
But from memory most large buildings in the downtown area are on deep foundations in soils, not to bedrock.
Chicago's foundations are inherently unstable. IMO it makes being scientific about blaming "underground climate change" substantially more difficult. The journalist is out to lunch after strictly reporting on what these specific folks are saying and measuring.
If I didn't live and work there for years in the distant past, having spent many a nights drinking in bars below grade because of its history, I wouldn't know the amount of skepticism the "science" reported in TFA really calls for.
Underground structures are one. Spacecraft are another. In each case, the principle problem is that the usual methods of rapid heat transfer --- conduction, convection, and radiation --- are constrained. And when heat accumulates, it's a considerable challenge.
The one fairly obvious thought that occurs to me is that this poses a potential opportunity for winter-time heating via ground-loop heat pumps. So long as there's a substantial amount of heat being transferred into the ground, it might also be extracted.
Cities are often known for district heating and cooling, where entire neighbourhoods have centrally-provisioned heat (often residual steam from electrical generation or industrial processes). I'm not sure that low-grade ground thermal heat could readily be transported (say, from Chicago's downtown "Loop" to surrounding neighbourhoods) in the same way, but this does seem an potential option.
There's also nearby Lake Michigan which might serve as another potential cooling reservoir should active chilling of the ground prove necessary, though that would be a major engineering undertaking of itself.
I've some suspicions about the study methodology which relies on sensors placed within structures, and in one case literally in a boiler room, which ... would seem likely to experience anomolous and localised heating. (The lack of thermal monitoring within the Chicago subway system seems a lost opportunity.) I suspect that a system of ground wells sampled throughout the city might provide a more robust set of data on actual ground-temperature patterns over time.
The constraint for large scale city heat pumps in the winter would be that you don't freeze up the ground. The suggested solution is A/C via heat pump in the summer. But if you have just too much excess heat anyway then that's actually good news.
Vermont is under water and people are dying of heat stroke due to temperature records and odd weather patterns all over the northern hemisphere. While this topic seems smaller than, for example, the diesel emissions scandal.
Since then I've seen Chicago depicted as a dangerous, gang-ridden city, a portrayal that doesn't align with my firsthand experiences. I reside near Uptown, an area frequently labeled as one of Chicago's riskiest neighborhoods and coincidentally, a predominantly African-American district on the North Side. Yet, I perceive it as secure as the suburban regions I grew up in.
As a result, this personal experience has fostered skepticism towards outside news coverage about Chicago, especially those entangled with coverage on topics one can count upon to be politically polarized.
Just my $0.02, but perhaps weightier than usual due to the long-term of it all.
I was walking all over the Loop at 2AM and felt completely safe. It was refreshing. I'd never feel safe doing that in my home city (Richmond, VA).
Granted, the Loop is the CBD, so it's probably inherently safer than other parts of Chicagoland, but it's still rather amazing to me to feel so comfortable in the country's third largest city.
You'll have to pardon me. It's Saturday afternoon and I'm just idly reading the comments on this topic.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
My close friend was burglarized 3 separate times one winter. Once while he was home (so technically robbed, I guess). They even took his winter coat.
Every city has good parts and bad parts. You sound like you live in a good part. Doesn’t mean that bad parts don’t exist.
> known as Democratic since the 1940s ..., gained national significance with the onset of Obama's campaign and presidency
No, it gained "national significance" with the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Martin Luther King marches in Cicero in the 60's, and the Weathermen riots of 1969.
As for your "perceptions" they might be more persuasive if accompanied by some crime maps.
Having just done five years in the Cook County Jail though I got to see first-hand the sheer amount of gang-related crimes that were being committed. I feel that as a white guy I am applying some sort of filter to my reality which avoids me hearing or knowing about most of the violence in the City, which is predominantly Black-on-Black violence.
Parts of the City are very segregated though. I live in Chatham neighborhood on the South Side now and most days I am the only white person I see here. They call me Mr Detective. I'm routinely told this is an extremely violent neighborhood, and I keep hearing about shootings and deaths, but somehow my reality filter means I miss seeing any of it in person. I keep being told that it is too dangerous and I shouldn't live here. This is the friendliest neighborhood I've lived in in Chicago. Everyone here on the streets greets you as you go by.
Chicago is a weird, messed-up city. Plus the weather is nuts.
That is really, really f'ing annoying, and it's the scientific equivalent of click bait. The phenomenon described in this article seems largely unrelated to greenhouse gas-induced climate change, and instead appears to be more directly related to just more underground heat sources being constructed.
Confusing these two different phenomena does nobody any good, and my suspicion is that scientists would use the term "underground climate change" because "Hey, above ground climate change gets a lot of press, if I call this 'underground climate change' maybe I can get some better press too."
If the people working in this field find it intuitively similar enough to justify using the term, I don't have any particular reason to question their motives about it. Using a similar term does not necessarily mean "confusing two different phenomena".
Bike wheels and airplane wheels work very differently, for different purposes, but are similar enough in enough ways to justify using the same term. It's quite possible to differentiate when that's necessary, and also it usually isn't.
I have a very strong difficulty believing that scientists who call this "underground climate change" aren't doing this with the deliberate intent to latch on to all the press/importance of atmospheric climate change.
> Bike wheels and airplane wheels work very differently, for different purposes, but are similar enough in enough ways to justify using the same term. It's quite possible to differentiate when that's necessary, and also it usually isn't.
Do you honestly believe that analogy has anything to do with the point I'm making here?
The idea that science is a completely neutral endeavor completely separate from the world it takes place in is pure fantasy. A modest amount of marketing for the research is part of doing the research, and always has been.
Local soil dynamics are changing, due to human activity. So "(localized) climate change" is a perfectly reasonable description of what's happening, to a first order approximation.
The rest is just fluff and bother. I can see someone having a "meh" reaction to this choice of language. But to be "really, really fucking annoyed" by it?
I submit there are other, much bigger and genuinely sinister things at loose in the world you might want to direct your precious capacities to be "really, really fucking annoyed" at.
My suspicion is that scientists would use the term "underground climate change" [to get more press]"
More likely they were just trying to put the matter in a terms the lay person would understand.
The entire climate of the planet is being affected by human development, and amalgamating its effects under a single term has more value than segregating the disparate areas, just to satisfy the semantically nitpicky.