Land Subsidence

Major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, in some cases as much as 5 millimeters per year – a decline at the ocean’s edge that well outpaces global sea level rise, confirms new research from Virginia Tech and the U.S. Geological Survey. Particularly hard hit population centers such as New York City and ...

Global water resources are stretched by climate change and human population growth, and farms and cities are increasingly turning to groundwater to fill their needs. Unfortunately, the pumping of groundwater can cause the ground surface above to sink, as the aquifers below are drained and the architecture of the ground collapses. For the first time, ...

Combined with California’s large population, long history of drought and tendency to be battered by nearly every form of climate change, massive groundwater pumping is aggravating water scarcity, said Xuechen Yang, lead author of the case study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. “By 2025, more than 5 billion ...

An analysis of thousands of water and oil wells in the Houston metro area has uncovered significant rates of subsidence, or gradual sinking of the ground, in some of the region’s fast-growing suburbs that have not been previously reported. Shuhab Khan, professor of geology at the University of Houston, led the study published in the ...