I’m with Bob Pike on this. Again.
Simply assuming wishing that a diaphragm wall that large will just conveniently sink out of the way is… well, just incredibly dumb. Both the frictional surface and the footprint are huge. Which is why diaphragm walls sometimes are designed to be part of a foundation.
Next thing they’ll might try is to wash away some clay under the wall, or liquefy a layer of clay.
Which would be tricky because they might remove too much clay / remove it to fast / remove it not uniformly. And before you know it the damn thing starts to lean in two directions.
(Or starts leaning in the opposite direction. And then they’ll try to fix that, with another fix. Which they’ll somehow botch too. Making the tower sort of wag itself very, very slowly. Until half of it is underground and it finally settles on the bedrock. But still leaning to one side.)
Afterthought: come to think about it, I’m somewhat surprised that one of the great thinkers of this age, who also happens to own a revolutionary tunneling company, hasn’t suggested an even more ludicrous solution yet.
