New York, the sinking metropolis because of its skyscrapers

The city that never sleeps, the one whose buildings almost touch the sky, would collapse under the weight of its colossal constructions. This was warned by a study which found that New York, a US city home to more than 8.4 million people, is sinking at an average rate of 1-2 millimeters per year, while some areas are doing it at twice the rate.

“Geodetic measurements show an average subsidence rate of 1-2mm/yr across the city, which is consistent with postglacial regional deformation, although we found some areas with significantly higher subsidence rates” , details the scientific article.

The revelation, say the authors, warns of the risk of increased flooding in the east coast city, considering to add the rise in sea levels and the increase in natural phenomena which aggravate the situation, such as storms. . The work was led by US Geological Survey geophysicist Tom Parsons, as well as University of Rhode Island oceanologists Pei-Chin Wu, Meng (Matt) Wei and Steven D’Hondt.

“New York City faces increasing flood risk from rising sea levels, subsidence, and increased intensity from both natural and man-made storms.” In this way, the work of scientists begins their study by pointing to both human and nature reasons to explain the reason.

Between 1950 and today, researchers say sea levels around New York have risen about 9 inches, while storm-related flooding could be four times more frequent than today by the end of the century, said The Guardian. The combination of the rise in sea level and the increase in the frequency of hurricanes – a product of climate change – would explain the origin of the threat.

“A highly concentrated population of people face varying degrees of flood danger in New York City,” the authors of the Earth’s Future magazine article wrote.

The study “Future Flood Losses in Major Coastal Cities”, published in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2013 and which was part of an OECD project, already anticipated that climate change and the rapid increase in the world’s population could say that the risk of flooding in major cities could increase ninefold by 2050, when New York was the third city in the world likely to generate the most monetary losses in the world “due to its high wealth and its low level of protection,” the report said.

In a few words, and by way of summary, the authors detailed their way of working, specifying that they calculated “the mass of all the buildings in New York and we modeled the collapse caused by the pressure they exert on the ground”.

The aim of the article, they added, is to “raise awareness that every high-rise building constructed in coastal, river or lake areas may contribute to increased flood risk in the future, and that it may be necessary to include mitigation strategies,” they added.

While Tom Parsons, one of the authors, said “there’s nothing to panic about right now”, he said one should remember that “there is this process going on, which increases the risk of flooding”, detailed the ABC newspaper. .

According to the same media, the risk of flooding increases by adding the densification of building construction to the rise in sea level which, by 2050, could increase between 200 and 600 millimeters worldwide.

“The softer the ground, the greater the compression of buildings. It was not a mistake to build such tall buildings in New York, but you have to take into account that every time you build something there, you push the ground a little more,” added the scientist.

According to calculations by academics, the total mass of the 1,084,954 buildings that make up the Big Apple across the city’s five boroughs—including the iconic Empire State Building—is perched on complex glacial terrain, believed to include sediment, sand, clay deposits, glacial moraines, washing and tillage, beach deposits and rock outcrops.

Although many buildings are built on solid rock, not all are. This causes some of the 760,000 million kilos of buildings to push, year after year, a few millimeters more towards the bottom of the sea, potentially endangering its inhabitants.