New York City is sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers. Can it be stopped?
- New research estimates the city’s land mass is sinking at an average rate of 1-2mm per year, under the weight of more than a million buildings
- The subsidence is set to exacerbate the impact of sea level rise caused by warming temperatures and the melting of the world’s ice caps
If New York is the city that never sleeps then how’s this for keeping you up at night? It is also sinking.
The Big Apple is gradually going down partly because of the weight of the skyscrapers that make the concrete jungle famous, a new study has found.
The descent makes the metropolis more vulnerable to rising sea levels and coastal flooding caused by climate change, the researchers noted.
The paper, published this month in the Earth’s Future journal, sought to estimate how the city’s vast infrastructure impacts subsidence.
Subsidence is the sinking of land mass caused by either natural processes such as erosion or human activity like mineral extraction.
The geologists calculated that New York’s more than one million buildings added up to a total mass of 1.68 trillion pounds (762 billion kilograms) of downward pressure on the earth.
