New York is sinking, and what makes its sink? A new study shows that the city’s skyscrapers are bringing it down. The new study that modelled the geology beneath the city compared to satellite data showed its footprint is collapsing into Earth.
The researchers said that New York sank at a rate of 1-2 millimetres per yearunder the weight of its sky-high buildings. Though stating that a few millimetres might not sound like much, it said that some parts of the city subsided much faster, on par with the fastest observed rates at which tectonic plates rebound when glaciers melt.
THE TROUBLE?
The researchers, who published the study in Earth’s Future, said the findings should encourage further efforts to develop mitigation strategies to counter growing flood risk and rising sea levels. It also said that building gigantic sea walls to fortify the city aren’t the right answer.
“The point of the paper is to raise awareness that every additional high-rise building constructed at coastal, river, or lakefront settings could contribute to future flood risk,” writes geologist Tom Parsons of the United States Geological Survey and his colleagues at the University of Rhode Island.
The study also brings the totality of human construction. As of 2020, scientists estimated that all the things humans made on Earth was close to or already outweighing the dry weight of every last living thing. Buildings and roads weigh more than all trees and shrubs combined, they said. Plastics double the weight of animals, they added.
THE METHOD
Parsons and colleagues calculated the cumulative mass of the more than one million buildings in New York City, which worked out to be 764,000,000,000 kilograms or 1.68 trillion pounds. Then they divvied up the city into a grid of 100-by-100-meter squares and converted building mass to downward pressure by factoring in gravity’s pull.
Their estimates only include the mass of buildings and their contents. It does not include roads, sidewalks, bridges, railways, and other paved areas of New York City. Even with those limitations, these new calculations refine past observations of subsidence in the city by accounting for the complex surface geology beneath New York that consists of sand, silt, and clay lake deposits, and bedrock outcrops.
Modelling the behaviour of these substrates, the researchers showed clay-rich soils and artificial fill are particularly prone to subsidence. Comparing these models with satellite data measuring land surface height, the team mapped its subsidence estimates across the city. Increased urbanization, including the draining and pumping of groundwater, could only add to New York’s subsidence problem, the researchers warn.
NOT JUST NEW YORK
New York is certainly not alone in its subsidence. A quarter of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, could be underwater by 2050, with parts of the city sinking by almost 11 centimetres a year due to groundwater extraction. New York, by comparison, ranks third in its exposure to future flooding. Much of lower Manhattan lies only 1 and 2 meters above current sea levels. Hurricanes in 2012 (Sandy) and 2021 (Ida) also showed how quickly the mostly paved city could be flooded by water.
“New York is emblematic of growing coastal cities all over the world that are observed to be subsiding, meaning there is a shared global challenge of mitigation against a growing inundation hazard,” the researchers conclude.
A 2022 study of 99 coastal cities around the world found that subsidence might actually pose a bigger, or at least underrated, problem compared to sea-level rise. In most cities surveyed, the land is subsiding faster than sea levels are rising, which means residents will be challenged by flooding sooner than climate models have projected.
While tons of skyscrapers have already been built, our planet’s future trajectory is not set in stone – and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the best bet we have to limit future risks, be they rising seas or hurricanes.
