Your Fault: Cities Sinking Under Weight Of Buildings

Somehow this is all linked to ‘climate change’

Cities Sinking Under The Weight Of Their Buildings

climate change joke

The Empire State Building, erected in 1931, weighs 365,000 tons — a relatively modest figure by today’s standards, since it isn’t even close to being the tallest building in New York City anymore. The skyline is now dominated by residential towers with apartments sold to billionaires. Still, the Empire State Building’s weight hints at just how much mass the island of Manhattan carries, and that weight is one reason the island is slowly sinking into the water around it. New York is only one of several major cities facing a problem that grows more serious every year.

There’s a scientific term for this sinking: subsidence. Scientists define it as the gradual sinking or settling of the ground surface, usually because material beneath it shifts, compacts, or is removed. Subsidence can have several causes: mining beneath a city (including subway construction), the extraction of groundwater (which creates a kind of underground drought), weak underlying rock such as limestone, the removal of soil and rock to build foundations for huge structures, and simply the sheer weight of buildings pressing down on the ground over time. Together, these factors explain why some of the world’s largest cities are slowly sinking lower and lower. In places like New Orleans, where part of the city already sits below sea level, subsidence makes an already precarious situation even worse.

I mean, this is nothing new: there land subsidence in NYC of about 1-2mm per year post glacial period. Lower Manhattan is not built on bedrock like middle to upper Manhattan. There’s the notion that all the buildings “add roughly 1.68 trillion pounds of pressure.” Oh, hey, Climate Crisis 247 even mentions all this in their article

Among US cities, New York’s situation is extraordinary. A 2023 USGS study found that New York City’s roughly one million buildings weigh an estimated 1.68 trillion pounds. The combined mass of these buildings pushes the ground down, contributing to subsidence of 1 to 2 millimeters per year on average. In areas like Queens, where heavy storms already cause flooding, the problem is especially severe — and these floods will eventually render parts of the city uninhabitable.

New York’s problem is compounded by rising sea levels driven by global warming and melting polar ice. Columbia University geophysicist Jacky Austermann wrote, according to Scientific American, that most people think of sea-level rise purely in terms of melting ice, but that’s only part of the story at any given location — land subsidence, whatever its cause, is another major factor. As she put it, whether the land is sinking or the sea is rising, the flooding effect at the shoreline is the same.

Sigh. You just had to know that cult business would show up, right? The Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, shows 2.95 millimeters/year increase, equivalent to 0.97 feet in 100 years, which is below what should be occurring during a Holocene warm period.

One of America’s fastest-growing cities, Miami’s population rose from 249,276 in 1950 to 489,801 today, according to Census figures. A University of Miami estimate — one that many have disputed, but which nonetheless underscores the scale of the risk — projects an additional 11 to 22 inches of sea-level rise by 2060, and 28 to 57 inches (roughly the height of a car) by 2100. If accurate, about two-thirds of the city could be below sea level by 2060. Much of Miami sits on porous limestone, hemmed in by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Everglades on the other. The city has weathered several hurricanes over the past half-century, each pushing storm surges ashore, and the rapid rise in large-scale construction has made Miami one of the US cities considered most at risk for subsidence-driven flooding.

Miami’s sea rise is 1.05 feet per hundred years. Not 11-22 inches in a bit over 30 years.

Unlike most cities on this list, Houston isn’t located near a major body of water. Even so, heavy urban development combined with groundwater and oil and gas extraction has caused parts of the metro area to sink more than 10 feet, according to the USGS. Limited and poorly maintained infrastructure — in a wet city with no zoning — makes Houston especially vulnerable to devastating floods, NBC reported.

Seriously, they took legitimate science and turned it into cult business.