New York is sinking to the ground from the weight of its skyscrapers

In fact, the total weight of these buildings is estimated by researchers to be 764 million tons, causing the collapse of the city. A study published in Earth’s future Modeling of the city’s underground geology reveals that New York is sinking at a rate of 1 to 2 mm per year.

If these statistics seem insignificant, they are significant enough to worry the scientific community. Note that these results represent averages only. Thus, Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn or Queens are sinking much faster (twice as fast) than the rest of the city. This difference is explained by the nature of the soil, which is a mixture of clay, sand and silt.

America is still reeling from snow, wind and flooding

This phenomenon is called by scientists: “depression”. It is a sinking of the Earth’s crust, due to additional charges on this crust. New York is a coastal city, its buildings are very low-rise, and the city is very crowded, increasing the risk of this event. As a result, 8 million people are threatened by water.

“The purpose of this article is to raise awareness that every new high rise building built by a sea, river or lake may contribute to future flood risk”, says Tom Parsons, a geologist at the US Geological Survey. Parsons and his colleagues accumulated more than one million buildings in the city, or 764,000,000 tons, not counting the buildings, roads, sidewalks, bridges, and railroads.

In New York, flash floods and residents in unprecedented shock

Climate change will lead to more natural disasters, violent weather and rising sea levels, so New York is threatened by flooding. Lower Manhattan is already between 1 and 2 meters above sea level and is therefore particularly vulnerable to inundation. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy had already flooded the city. In 2021, forty people died in floods caused by Hurricane Ida.

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