Earth's weight capacity

[red67]

How much weight (manmade) can the Earth withstand?<br /><br />

 

[grooble]

infinite, you can't exactly add more mass than is already here without bringing it in from other planets or Roids.

 

[meteo]

I don't really understand the question either, be more specific. Are you talking about a city causing land to sink?

 

[askold]

Or do you mean how heavy (tall) a building the Earth could support????

 

[jcdenton]

<font color="yellow">How much weight (manmade) can the Earth withstand? </font><br /><br />That would depend on the soil you're building on. I believe this field of study is called geotechnic engineering. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[nexium]

We expect the ocean level to rise when and if the ice caps melt. At enourmous cost we could dredge the shallow parts of the ocean and pile the the dirt on saltwater swamps until the new surface was 200 meters above sealevel. Dreging would reduce the amount of ocean level rise very slightly. As the coastal plains (including many of our cities) became the new salt marsh, we could cover them with with almost 200 meters of dreged material. At some point this new land height would unbalance the plate tetonics, and some of the artificially raised land would sink toward the center of Earth a few meters. We would then have exceeded the "Earth's weight capacity" Neil

 

[paleo]

The Earth's 'weight' capacity doesn't change. <br /><br /> Anything man could do has no more effect than a feather on a mountain. Man can't shift ten trillionth of the Earth's mass.<br /><br /> Puting weight on a particular geographic point (a city block)...and having the ground sink a few meters only has an impact from the immediacy of a human perspective but zilcho at a geologic level.