New York City is slowly sinking into the surrounding bodies of water and is increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters, according to new research.
The United States Geological Survey is warning that the weight of the city’s skyscrapers is causing the Big Apple to sink lower into its surrounding bodies of water at a rate of one to two millimeters a year.
Lead researcher and geologist Tom Parsons told the New York Post that some areas are subsiding even faster than that, with Lower Manhattan particularly at risk and concern for Brooklyn and Queens.
He said the rate of sinkage may not seem much, but New York faces significant challenges from flood hazard with the threat of sea level rise three to four times higher than the global average along the Atlantic coast of North America.
“A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of hazard from inundation in New York City,” the survey reported.
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“Two recent hurricanes caused casualties and heavy damage in New York City. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy forced sea water into the city, whereas heavy rainfall from Hurricane Ida in 2021 overwhelmed drainage systems because of heavy runoff within the mostly paved city.”
The Post reports that Parsons fears that the structural integrity of the city’s many buildings could be at risk in the future as the combination of tectonic and anthropogenic subsidence, sea level rise, and increasing hurricane intensity cause an accelerating problem along coastal and riverfront areas.
“Repeated exposure of building foundations to salt water can corrode reinforcing steel and chemically weaken concrete causing structural weakening,” said Parsons.
He added that greenhouse gas “appears to be reducing the natural wind shear barrier along the US East Coast, which will allow more frequent high intensity hurricane events in the coming decades.”
He added that many of New York’s real estate additions built since the devastation of Sandy are not taking the situation seriously enough.
“New York City is ranked third in the world in terms of future exposed assets to coastal flooding and 90% of the 67,400 structures in the expanded post-Hurricane Sandy flood-risk areas have not been built to floodplain standards,” he added.
“New York is emblematic of growing coastal cities all over the world that are observed to be subsiding, meaning there is a shared global challenge of mitigation against a growing inundation hazard.”
