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In summer the Eiffel Tower can grow by about 15 centimeters and even leans slightly away from the sun.

Why can the Eiffel Tower be noticeably taller in summer than in winter?

The iron expands in heat
Metal expands when heated. In summer the Eiffel Tower's iron can grow by about 15 centimeters, then shrink back as it cools. It also leans slightly away from the sun.

The Eiffel Tower is built primarily of iron, a metal that expands when heated and contracts when cooled. During warmer summer months the sheer scale of the structure means this expansion becomes noticeable, adding as much as about 15 centimeters to its overall height compared to colder winter conditions, when the metal contracts back down.

The idea that tourists weigh it down in winter or that the ground itself rises in summer are not real physical explanations, tourist weight has no meaningful effect on a structure of that mass, and there is no mechanism by which the ground beneath the tower would rise seasonally.

This same thermal expansion also causes the tower to lean very slightly away from the side facing direct sunlight, since the iron there heats and expands a bit more than the shaded side, creating a small, temporary tilt that reverses as the temperature evens out.

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