Twenty-eight major cities in the United States, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are seeing their urban areas sink by some 2–10 millimeters per year, with Houston being the fastest-sinking city, new research has shown.
Massive ongoing groundwater extraction was found to be the most common cause of the sinking, which may push infrastructure “past their safety limit,” researchers warn in a study published in the journal Nature Cities.
The study, by researchers from Virginia Tech and several other U.S. universities, used satellite data to map out vertical land movements in 28 of the most populous cities, those where populations exceed 600,000 people…