How do engineers account for continental drift when building bridges and tunnels?

Question

How do engineers account for continental drift when building bridges and tunnels?

In: 8

Answer 1

Continents don’t drift like stretching taffy. They creak and judder and largely stay rigid, shifting along lines known as fault lines. And they don’t move smoothly – they stay still for years and then there’s an earthquake and they move a lot (like, several inches) in a short time.

You typically don’t build a bridge straight across a fault line. If you do, it falls down in the next earthquake. You certainly don’t do something as dumb as tunnelling across a fault.