NOVA
Season 42 Episode 16 - Hagia Sophia: Istanbul’s Ancient Mystery
Whether serving as Christian church, Islamic mosque, or secular museum, Hagia Sophia and its saring dome have inspired reverence and awe. For 800 years, it was the largest enclosed building in the world—the Statue of Liberty can fit beneath its dome with room to spare. How has it survived its location on one of the world’s most active seismic faults, which has inflicted a dozen devastating earthquakes since it was built in 537? As Istanbul braces for the next big quake, a team of architects and engineers is urgently investigating Hagia Sophia’s seismic secrets. Follow engineers as they build a massive 8-ton model of the building’s core structure, place it on a motorized shake table, and hit it with a series of simulated quakes, pushing it collapse—a fate that the team is determined to avoid with the real building.
Episodes in Season 42
Vaccines Calling the Shots
55 min
Rise of the Hackers
55 min
Why Planes Vanish
55 min
Surviving Ebola
55 min
Ben Franklin's Balloons
55 min
First Air War
55 min
Bigger Than T. rex
55 min
Emperor’s Ghost Army
55 min
Killer Landslides
55 min
First Man on the Moon
55 min
Big Bang Machine
55 min
Sunken Ship Rescue
55 min
Sinkholes—Buried Alive
55 min
Colosseum: Roman Death Trap
55 min
Petra: Lost City of Stone
55 min
Hagia Sophia: Istanbul’s Ancient Mystery
55 min
The Great Math Mystery
55 min
Invisible Universe Revealed
55 min
Nazi Attack on America
55 min
Lethal Seas
55 min
Chasing Pluto
55 min
Nuclear Meltdown Disaster
55 min
