NOVA Season 42 Episode 16 Synopsis

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.

NOVA Season 42 Episodes...

• s42e01 - Vaccines Calling the Shots
• s42e02 - Rise of the Hackers
• s42e03 - Why Planes Vanish
• s42e04 - Surviving Ebola
• s42e05 - Ben Franklin's Balloons
• s42e06 - First Air War
• s42e07 - Bigger Than T. rex
• s42e08 - Emperor's Ghost Army
• s42e09 - Killer Landslides
• s42e10 - First Man on the Moon
• s42e11 - Big Bang Machine
• s42e12 - Sunken Ship Rescue
• s42e13 - Sinkholes-Buried Alive
• s42e14 - Colosseum - Roman Death Trap
• s42e15 - Petra - Lost City of Stone
• s42e16 - Hagia Sophia: Istanbul's Ancient Mystery
• s42e17 - The Great Math Mystery
• s42e18 - Invisible Universe Revealed
• s42e19 - Nazi Attack on America
• s42e20 - Lethal Seas
• s42e21 - Chasing Pluto
• s42e22 - Nuclear Meltdown Disaster

NOVA Show Summary

Seen in more than 100 countries, NOVA is the most watched science based television series in the world and the most watched documentary series on PBS. It is also one of television's most acclaimed series, having won many major television awards, most of them many times over.