then to a series of 200 thousand gallon tanks until it reaches the top of the building then the water simply flows back down under its own weight almost a quarter million gallons of water a day pass through the building enough to keep its inhabitants happy Engineers use this clever technology all over the city today John's team is finishing up the water network in the princess tower the world's tallest residential building they must push water up 100 floors more than a quarter of a mile what we're looking at here is the water tank on the 79th floor when it reaches the 79th floor it has already been stepped up three times in terms of capacity what you are seeing here is three hundred thousand litres of water if one could strip away all the layers that hide the water infrastructure who become evident just how fast the water engineering and in a large city like the Y is Dubai has more than 200 skyscrapers and they're incredibly thirsty they're glass skins concealed thousands of miles of pipes sucking millions of gallons of water a minute from pipes buried deep under the sand shielded from the scorching heat these steel arteries supply each citizen with 145 gallons of water a day water is at the heart of everything in Dubai and the city's engineers have mastered it another massive challenge is keeping Dubai soaring skyscrapers standing tall on the soft desert sand this is the most impressive street in the Middle East Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai it's crammed with over 50 skyscrapers more per block than in Manhattan each tower weighs up to a quarter of a million tons but all around and below them hidden under the streets and sidewalks his soft deserts and the big challenge for Dubai's engineers is to stop these towers from toppling over this is the man who knows how it's done engineer Nasser Nasser his latest Colossus is more than 600 feet tall the BER side Boulevard Tower now is this the latest drawing which we have when I first came here none of this existed it was one huge big desert the only way to move around here was only in four-wheel drive now look at that do you have one of the most sophisticated and the luxurious towns all over the world the birds hot Boulevard is a steel and concrete Goliath this building weighs about a hundred thousand tons that's a pretty heavy load you need some solid foundations to take this load and distribute it and solid foundations needs solid rock to rest on east of the city in the Hajj our mountains geologist Catherine Good Enough reveals the origins of Dubai's bedrock these mountains are really really important for Dubai because it's from these mountains that the foundations of Dubai cane these rocks that we're looking at here these were actually formed about 95 million years ago I say they're part of the ocean floor but then can huge tectonic forces and compressional forces squeeze that seafloor and push these rocks up onto the edge of the continent where they are now thirty million years ago a crash of two continental plates thrust the Hajj are mountains two miles upwards over millions of years water raining down on their peaks ripped rocks away from the mountains and washed them all the way to Dubai here they formed a thick layer of rubble it's still visible today where a road cuts through the hills I can see here it's basically a pile of rubble and it's made up of rounded rocks like this one and because they're so around it I know that these lumps of rock were brought here by rivers and what happened then was that fluids flowed through that gravel and started to deposit carbonate minerals and that's these whitish minerals here and those carbonates formed to cement the carbonate cemented the rubble from the mountains into bedrock today this is buried up to 130 feet under the sand that's why Dubai is one of the toughest places in the world to build skyscrapers in normal countries you have the bedrock at a very shallow depth so then you go into it few meters and that would be the length that you require to hold the high-rise this is actually what we are dealing with here we design we have to worry about these sands which are other lose or cemented I mean we're talking about such conditions existing until about 25 or 30 meters below the drop to reach the bedrock Nasser's team must drill through 115 feet of sand they fill the holes with a thick clay slurry to stop them from caving in then they drop in long steel cages and pump 100 tons of concrete into each hole this hardens into a rigid pillar called a foundation pile in Manhattan a building like this needs just a handful of piles to stand up in Dubai it needs 250 they squashed the ground under the skyscraper into a rock solid foundation that's the secret of building tall in Dubai if you actually can visualize it and just look deep into the ground now you would be actually looking at a concrete jungle with huge poles of 1 meter size we have about 250 of them under this tower and they stretch down to about 36 to 40 meters a building like the BIR Zeit Boulevard needs over 75,000 tons of concrete casting it in the desert heat is nearly impossible imagine in the summer the temperature outside rotates around 50 degrees Celsius now that is a lot of heat if you start in the morning for example and you hit the high temperatures at 12:00 1:00 2:00 o'clock then your concrete would simply be spoiled you cannot you're going to have such big cracks you can have to destroy it cracks can cause buildings to crumble so Nasser's team always works through the night to keep dubai skyline growing there's more concrete per block under Sheikh Zayed Road than almost any other street in the world but without these piles Dubai as we know it would not exist the city's engineers have cracked the challenge of anchoring skyscrapers in the sand but they must also protect them from the ferocious desert wind Dubai's extravagance is a magnet for the rich and famous and this is the place where the wealthiest of them come to stay the Burj Al Arab one of the tallest and most expensive hotels in the world a week in this seven star palace could set you back $100,000 VIPs arrived 700 feet up on the helipad landing here isn't always a breeze today wind speed peaks at 45 miles an hour a challenge even for former Canadian Forces pilot Don Douglas back 300 feet above the under deck that's doubling on final firming winds again let me get lower just come on load up the plate and it's a space for a little bit of turbulence. there's a whip coming on one side of the strut and the other side and then they kind of birch together and it caused a little bit of turbulence or closer and slower go on fight back and I want to start feeling didi wins I enjoyed it today was hairy but it can get worse the wind in Dubai can hit 80 miles an hour protecting buildings from these storms is another challenge for the city's engineers and this is the place where they come to test their designs Tom Bell Wright runs an outdoor laboratory that can simulate a Desert Storm have you got this beam set up correctly for these guys how you over here Tom's job is to test the cladding that makes up the skin of skyscrapers and he uses an old aircraft engine as a giant wind machine this test today will test for everything that Mother Nature can throw at the building if the system is gonna fail we're gonna find out where it fails and how it fails as he brings it up to full speed the crew add water into the mix so even tiny cracks and the panels show up if the inspectors spot just a trace of water inside the design will fail [Applause] so the how'd it go guys all good I'm told though that's so that's that test out of the way this this dynamic test is a great test the representative the real weather that we get it's the kind of forces that buildings have to be built to resist but it's not enough just to protect the outer parts of a building in the Burj Al Arab the most impressive technology lies hidden under its skin the blowing across the Gulf are so strong they could bend or even break the building's concrete core so engineers wrap the Burj Al Arab in a strong steel frame bolted to a steel spine and exoskeleton this ingenious invention spreads the force of the wind and stabilizes the concrete core hidden inside the skeleton our shock absorbers these move against the direction of the wind and reduce the motion even more so guests can sip their expensive cocktails without feeling seasick but when the winds blow from the desert there's another threat sand powerful sand storms can appear totally out of the blue they raced towards Dubai at ferocious speeds pelting thousands of tons of sand across the streets the most violent sandstorms can shut down the city for days this one caught on tape reduces visibility to just a few feet sand storms wreak havoc on anything that's not tied down they clog gutters stop traffic and ground plays Dubai is in the firing line because it sits on the edge of the largest continuous stretch of sand in the world the rub al khali desert it's not the place you want to be on a stormy day to nothing and driving around in the jeans you've really gotta be able to see where you're going catherine has ventured deep into the ruble connelly on her mapping mission she's become a master in the science of dune driving very high desert in enhancing it's fast furious going in for the tune now going in for a tune edge and it's just a question of letting the car drive it's no point in touching the brakes because if you do that you just end up weighing in then you can end up in all sorts of trouble very quickly reading the contours of these dunes helps Kathryn power across them I'm just gonna have to accelerate a bit to tranq it up this bit of sand and it gives her clues about how the wind interacts with them something's a bit like puzzles really there's quite a lot of information in them I think up this June I can see that the shadow side is where the the winds coming from playing the sand grains at the shadow side and then they're blowing off down the steep side it's quite breezy today but most of the sand is still just rolling it on the surface of the dunes here as the wind gets stronger it starts to pick up heavier grains of sand when they crash back down they release a myriad of dust particles these billow high up into the air in dense clouds of driving sand when they finally hit Dubai they're not a welcome sight especially if you're the man in charge of health and safety at the Burj Al Arab the sandstone will built up from from the inland and you can basically see it's like a big cloud that is running up here the cloud is covering the whole of birch and we're looking at a speed of approximately 15 to 20 knots we need to elite the verge everything is full of dust everything gates that it four times a year armed with jet washers a daring crew get ready to launch themselves off the Burj Al Arab to give it a good scrubbing this is a high risk of a because there's people are completely relying on the ropes and the harnesses we start wearing the gusting wind makes this a tough job it's currently running a thing knots now so it's getting very close to that borderline we need to stop work and getting people back from the Sun it takes 14 nights to wash all the sand off the Burj Al Arab and make it gleam again for the visitors most of Dubai's wealth comes from a geological treasure oil extracting it is another major challenge for engineers the driving force behind Dubai's incredible growth is oil the Arabian Gulf region has more of it than anywhere else in the world but tapping into the black gold is not easy the waters off Dubai can be over 200 feet deep and then there's up to two miles of sand and rocks sitting on top of the oil fields finding and exploiting those precious reservoirs is a real challenge ten miles from the city in this construction yard workers are building oil platforms that can take on the Arabian Gulf today engineer basil Georgia cop Alisa is launching a brand new one call the jack up rig the rig that we're building here is specifically designed for this region the Arabian Gulf where the water depth range up to about 200 feet looks like we're just about to kick off the jack up rig is no ordinary oil platform it's designed to be mobile and hunt for oil] traditional production rigs stand in one spot fix two foundations drill deep into the seafloor a jack Lupus rig is less restricted it can float out wherever it's needed and then extend its long legs large flat feet spread its weight safely over the seabed they hold the rig firm while its drill pierces the rock to tap into the treasure hidden under the Gulf a rig like this cost 165 million US dollars to build and we can have up to a thousand people working on it at any one time such a big investment is only worth it because the returns out here are immense the arabian gulf pulled over half a trillion barrels of oil the bulk of our planet's known oil reserves how did so much oil end up in one place answers lie 15 miles north of the city in a shallow Lagoon this one the kind of untouched bits of coastline and I can see again aims that would be covered by the tideer high water the tide is left behind thick layers of algae in the lagoon very dark organic looking stuff here and tide line I think this might be what we're looking for well this is amazing it's almost like they're both leather actually it's a sheet of living organisms or the remains of living organisms the ancestors of these tiny organisms made the oil in Dubai 200 million years ago the area would have sat at the bottom of an ocean it's warm shallow waters teamed with microscopic sea creatures as they died they formed a carpet of cadavers on the seafloor sediments settled on top increasing the pressure and heat below over time this transformed the dead sea creatures into oil this black gold sat trapped until cracks in the rocks around it allowed it to upwards and cool in hundreds of pockets deep under the Gulf it's this geological accident that really put Dubai on the map in the Construction Yard basil's rig is ready for action the crew must now move the six thousand ton steel monster onto an ocean-going barge it's a lot of eyes watching and it's a very critical operation so that we can actually achieve the delivery date they have just 80 minutes at high tide to complete the operation if they fail the barge could be grounded the first time we tried this box and I don't want to run out of time at the moment everybody's sort of watching these ramps that have moved a little bit for Todd the team floods ballast tanks in the front of the barge to balance the massive weight bearing down on the back end these when the barge is really starting to feel the bending moment now we're just gonna go watch the bow because there's the weight shifts onto the barge now she's gonna tend to want to tilt forward all going very well actually the ballasting has been good the weight shifting knives do so excellent the rig makes it onto the barge just before the tide turns in a few weeks it will join the hunt for oil and power Dubai's expansion it's gonna go out to the Arabian Gulf port as a chosen location it will begin pretty much operating immediately this is the latest in a series of oil rigs pumping more than 50 thousand barrels a day from Dubai's offshore oil pockets together they generate more than a billion dollars a year for the city oil help Dubai explode into the thriving economic hub it is today but is more and more people flock here in search of a paradise retreat the city is running out of space .Dubai is the fastest growing desert city on earth but to attract the super rich and sustain its growth it needs to offer beachfront real estate which is in limited supply so engineers came up with this the palm jumeirah a man-made island shaped like a giant palm tree it's a monumental feat of Engineering pulling the plug on the ocean reveals its true scale the size of 1,000 football fields it sits inside a barrier made from over seven million tons of rock 150 million tons of sand creates space for over 5,000 homes a luxury island resort built right into the ocean Akhil azim has witnessed the islands rise from the deep this obviously came out of a certain need and at that point dubai did have a very short shoreline that left very little space for luxury beachfront properties it added seventy kilometers to our existing shoreline this works very well because it's got a very large circumference the the island not only looks beautiful from above it also because of the shape of the fronts each front has two rows of houses so there's one row going that way and then another vali ree coming back man-made islands like the poem are the ultimate way to expand the waterfront in Dubai and this is the type of machine they use to build them the cutter suction dredger Kaylee bay it can rip over a hundred thousand tons of sand and rock off the seafloor every week it's secret weapon this lethal cutter head on the cutter heads that are that could these mountains these are the hammers that they break the material we are dressing rock we're directing sending material in this cutter heads at the insides there's a big structure mouth and at section all material that has been loosened by there by the head itself better not fall in it building an island from scratch takes a whole fleet of dredgers they must harvest more than 150 million tons of sand a satellite feeds the exact shape of the island to the ship's navigation systems pipes shoot the sand back into the sea until the rough shape of the island rises above the surface finally boats with huge suction pumps smooth out the edges then the island is ready for people to move in to buy here you need cash lots of it the best plots sell for up to 50 million dollars [Music] what makes us unique is that is got a 275-degree view of the sea and this person has obviously paid a premium for this location a plot like this would typically go for about 170 million dirhams you would obviously be someone to whom money is no object building into the sea is the way to go in Dubai and the coastline has changed dramatically construction crews have used over 800 million tons of sand to create more than 900 city blocks of land in the sea that's enough sand to bury New York Central Park more than four feet deep the islands have created space for up to 3 million people and there are plans to build even more together they'll make the city shoreline seven times longer than it watched the dredgers have changed the coast of Dubai beyond recognition but nature is fighting back the wind and currents threatened to drag the sand back out to sea Engineers must take drastic action to protect their coastline from the ocean three miles from Dubai's coast a team of divers is heading for the city's latest mega project the world islands half a billion tons of sand sculpted into a map of the globe defending these islands from strong currents and winds is the latest challenge for city engineers Brendan jack is on his way to inspect the islands breakwater a huge wall of rocks that shields the islands from erosion the team is searching for a recent addition to the site using the GPS the location because we haven't marked it on maps we're keeping the location of a quad this top-secret location is the site of one of the most daring projects ever undertaken in Dubai right here okay four years ago divers discovered a huge coral reef a rare find in these waters but it lay at the entrance of a busy harbor and the corals were dying Brendan and his team took on the challenge of moving the entire reef to the world islands breakwater a seemingly impossible task never tried before when the work was done there was no guarantees of success the car we had here was what's called a heart or encrusting coral it grows very tightly on the rocks so if you use traditional relocation methods who wouldn't work here the reef was the biggest in Dubai with 22,000 colonies of corals if the team tried pulling them off the rocks one at a time they would kill one out of three so they came up with a radically new technique they drilled holes into the boulders that form the reef filled them with nontoxic glue and inserted steel rods then they were ready for the big move a crane lifted the boulders from the seabed and tied them to a barge now the crew could tow the corrals nine miles to their new home so they never left the water moving over a thousand boulders each weighing around five tons was an epic endeavor the team acted toe them out to the world Islands and gently lower them onto the breakwater hoping the corals were undamaged [Music] they have been spread over the space of 10 football fields to give this Karl the best chance that possibly has for survival and for growing more coral out here on the reef today Brendan's divers are checking on the corals to see how they're doing okay rough weather stirs up the water the swirl that we're experiencing today is exactly why the reef is here it is to provide that physical protection for the islands they've been created inside the breakwater normally a third of all relocated corals die but on first count over 90% on the world island reef are alive a unique achievement must be on their way back how's it looking but very very healthy good good the reef is doing its job now that coral is adding to the protection for the existing breakwater that is on the world so it fulfills the function of engineering wise but also in terms of jump-starting the ecological growth on the natural breakwater that we have built out here moving the reef cost 10 million dollars but it's money well spent to protect Dubai's coastline ingenious inventions like this hidden beneath the skin of the city that defend its coast suck oil from rock anchor towers in the sand and pump water up skyscrapers made Dubai rise up from the dunes and become this jewel in the dubai.
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