New York City is Sinking Under Its Own Weight: Here's How Fast It is Submerging and Is it Alone | Explained

New York with its glittering skyscrapers and bustling metropolis was recently in news because of its air quality crisis. The wildfire burning in Canada for weeks sent tonnes of smokes into the US and sending the Air Quality in New York to record high, turning the skyline into a sooty orange.

Not long after the city recovered from the crisis, reports have warned of another imminent threat that could directly affect an estimated 1.3 million New Yorkers.

New York City is sinking in part and the reason being a million buildings that make up an extraordinary weight pressing down on the Earth.

New York city is subsiding by up to 4 millimetres each year on an average apart from the rising sea level due to climate change, a recent study has revealed.

Why is New York Sinking?

In a research paper this year, scientists from the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography found that New York City is sinking at a rate of 1 to 4 millimetres per year.

Researchers have suggested a number of reasons why New York is sinking, but one of the prominent reasons is relentless construction. The fast-paced and ever-growing construction is causing the city to subside, raising the risk of future flooding.

Researchers in journal Earth’s Future tried calculating the collective weight of New York City’s buildings to estimate the degree of sinking resulting from those buildings. The researchers accessed the footprint and the height of 1,084,954 buildings in city’s five boroughs and multiplied it with the number of floors to calculate ‘idle weight’ or ‘dead load’.

They found that all the New York City’s buildings weigh 76,400 Crore kg or 1.68 trillion pounds, roughly the mass of 4,700 Empire State buildings, according to Forbes.

Some areas sinking faster

Scientist studied the surface geology of New York and found that it is very complex with materials including “silt, sand, and clay lake deposits, glacial moraines, outwash and till, beach deposits, and bedrock outcrops,”

Therefore, its not possible to determine what is beneath every other building, leaving it with a high degree of uncertainty.

While the midtown Manhattan is built directly over hard bedrock, the lower Manhattan and southern Brooklyn are built largely on artificial fill, a mix of materials thereby making it more vulnerable to sinking under the pressure of buildings.

The average subsidence rate across New York City is 1-2 millimetres a year, but areas like Queens and Brooklyn have a higher subsidence rate at about 4.5 millimetres a year.

Moreover, the ocean is also rising at a similar rate as the land is sinking and the changing climate could worsen the subsidence rate for parts of the city.

However, it will take hundreds of years before New York sinks into the ocean to look like Venice, which famously sank into the Adriatic Sea.

Is New York Sinking Alone?

No, New York is not sinking alone. A 2022 study looked at 48 largest coastal cities in the world, having a fifth of the global urban population and found out that 44 of them were found to have areas sinking faster than the rising sea levels.

The phenomenon is not alien to countries especially to those having metro cities in coastal areas. Indonesia has decided to shift its capital from Jakarta to Nusantara, as the former was rapidly sinking into the Java Sea.

Jakarta was described as the world’s most rapidly sinking city and it was estimated that one-third of the city could be submerged by 2050 at the current rate.

Another American city San Francisco is also putting pressure on the ground and the region’s active earthquake faults.