Efforts to Hold Up The Leaning Tower of Pisa Are Going Better Than Expected

One question springs to mind when you look at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, just how close it is to falling.

For hundreds of years, engineers, historians, and onlookers have held their breath at the fate of the bell tower, which has weathered four earthquakes and swayed back and forth.

The tower has been able to avoid a date with gravity. Engineers tried to get the structure back to its upright position before it was done.

Thanks to the survey of the bell tower, we can all exhale a sigh of relief. Since the last stabilization works were done, the tower has crept up by about 4 centimeters.

The survey was funded by OA, a non-profit organization that was established to oversee the preservation of the historic site.

The state of health of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is excellent, considering it is an 850-year-old patient with a tilt of around five meters and a subsidence of over three meters, according to an OA spokesman.

After the first few tiers of the Tower of Pisa were built, it was obvious something wasn't right. It was built on a base of mud, sand, and clay that was softer on the south side.

Engineers made the upper floors taller on one side than the other in order to correct the lean of the building.

Engineers tried to make the problem worse when the tower's tilt increased. The Tower of Pisa was no closer to solid ground in the 1990s than it was in the previous decade.

After the tower was closed to the public, the Italian government enlisted the help of a group of experts to find a way to save it. The north side of the tower was anchored with 900 tons of lead weights to counteract the sunken south.

The tower's north side was excavated when that didn't work. It started to rise and fall. Anyone who has ever played a game of Jenga knows how nerve-racking it is.

After 10 years of stabilization, the tower was finally finished in 2001 and it tilts just shy of 4 degrees, which is twice as much as the building's original lean.

Researchers from Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), mapped every part of the tower using 3D scans in order to create ghostly digital reconstructions of the tower that could be used for repairs.

Hopefully it won't. Nunziante Squeglia is a professor at the University of Pisa and is part of the monitoring group.

The bell tower's stability is better than expected according to Squeglia.

Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa isn't the only historic figure under close scrutiny for fear of collapsing. Scientists have been looking at cracks in David of Michelangelo's ankles for hundreds of years, an effort that intensified after a paper found that a slight tilt of 5 degrees could cause catastrophic failure. The earthquakes of the same year did not help calm the situation.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa should be safe for at least the next 300 years and possibly more, according to experts. The restoration efforts could be so successful that the tower could one day be right.

The same soft soils beneath the tower's foundation that produced its characteristic lean may now offer some protection from earthquakes, giving the structure a longer, less destructive natural vibrating period.

Will the Leaning Tower of Pisa ever be stable? What will it be called after that?