 Welcome back to Kids Fun Science. My name is Ken. Today's experiment is the earthquake shake table. As always, adult supervision is required. What you need for this experiment is blocks or sugar cubes, two rubber bands, four balls, two pieces of wood, or binder covers. So I do live in Northern California and we are knowing to have many, many earthquakes. So this experiment is the earthquake shake table. I'm setting up a structure. I'm using sugar cubes. You can use blocks, marshmallows, toothpicks, anything you really want. I'm going to make mine about, I think, three level high and give it a little shake and you can see the building comes down pretty quick. So when we make our shake table is something that, you know, architects really look closely here and they test us with this model that I got right here at a better scale than what I have. But by putting four balls in between two pieces of wood or binder covers, something that is equal in size, and then securing each end with a rubber band, a larger rubber band or a rubber band that will fit depending on how big of a structure you're using. I'm using a couple pieces of wood here. One buys and once you get that, you definitely have your shake table. And I will explain the science a little bit behind it and why California does it because see what it's doing right there is it's kind of taking the direct hit of an earthquake and moving it so the structures don't fall down. You can see the balls there. Now I'm going to set up the same structure again. I'm going to go by a three by three sugar cube structure. Nothing too architecturally sound, but enough to get the idea of what architects do out here in California, earthquake country. So once we get that, you're able to either give it a push or just kind of pull the wood back and forth with the structure and you're going to be able to see how it works from there. So what's cool is you can build higher structures and smaller structures. I got a little bit larger structure. There it goes. So I give a little pull push and you can see the structure wants to move a little bit, but it's not falling over as we first saw in the first test without the shake table. There I pushed it a little harder, got a little bit fall, but not much, which is pretty cool. So the science behind this is building an earthquake country can be very tricky business, right? So architects and engineers run simulations using these kind of models to shake tables to test the integrity of the buildings, determining the necessary reinforcements. So in my activity right here, I use a really simple non motorized shake table to test my structures. Planet Earth, as you know, is a layered planet, right? So it's dense, it's metallic core, a layer of hot liquid rock mantle, and a cold brittle surface called the crust, right? So the crust of the earth is broken up into several pieces, known as plates. Convention currents in the liquid mantle pull the plates, causing them to move against one another, and making the earthquake occur when the plates come together. State of California spans over two plates, the North America plate and the Pacific plate. The state is bisected by a very large, well-known crack, the San Andreas Fault. Earthquakes are measured by the Richter scale, and earthquake measuring 5.3 is considered moderate. A 6.3 would be considered strong, and 7.5 is usually considered severe. For historical references, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had a magnitude of 7.8, while the 1989 Loma Pruileta earthquake measured 7.0. Injuries and deaths occurred in the earthquake, generally occurred because of the building structures collapsing, also because of the unsecured objects falling off the shelves. And just for all you non-believers, you can see I don't have it glued down there. So here's a little bit higher stack. You can see with the shake table, it can handle six stories here of sugar cubes, but when we put it on a regular plate here and shake it, it just kind of wants to collapse. So I hope you enjoyed this video. Remember to click thumbs up and to subscribe. And I also linked my other earthquake video on here in case you guys are studying earthquakes, and you'd like to do that.