The East Coast of the United States is sinking. And not just because of global warming, or climate change, whatever you want to call it. Apparently, it is physically sinking: the land itself is falling into the planet at an alarming rate.
New research from scientists at Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) has found that the Atlantic coast urban areas – mostly in the northeastern US – are falling under the weight of all of those massive skyscrapers built there, among other things. And this is despite the fact that when building such skyscrapers they first dig down deep to get at the bedrock low down which is supposed to be strong enough to handle all that weifght. Otherwise, the buildings would just collapse before they are even completed.
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The researchers found that the hardest hit areas in danger of sinking are population centers like New York City and Long Island, Baltimore, and Virginia Beach and Norfolk. These areas are seeing rapid “subsidence,” or sinking land, alongside more slowly sinking or relatively stable ground, increasing the risk to roadways, runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines,
“Continuous unmitigated subsidence on the U.S. East Coast should cause concern,” said lead author Leonard Ohenhen, a graduate student working with Associate Professor Manoochehr Shirzaei at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab. “This is particularly in areas with a high population and property density and a historical complacency toward infrastructure maintenance.”
Using public available information, like satellite imagery provided by the government, Shirzaei and his research team pulled together a “vast collection of data points” measured by space-based radar satellites and used this” highly accurate information” to build digital terrain maps that show exactly where sinking landscapes present risks to the health of vital infrastructure.
These maps, which they describe as “groundbreaking,” show that a large area of the East Coast is sinking at least 2 mm per year, with several areas along the mid-Atlantic coast of up to 3,700 square kilometers, or more than 1,400 square miles, sinking more than 5 mm per year, more than the current 4 mm per year global rate of sea level rise.
“The problem is not just that the land is sinking. The problem is that the hotspots of sinking land intersect directly with population and infrastructure hubs,” said Ohenhen. “For example, significant areas of critical infrastructure in New York, including JFK and LaGuardia airports and its runways, along with the railway systems, are affected by subsidence rates exceeding 2 mm per year. The effects of these right now and into the future are potential damage to infrastructure and increased flood risks.”
