New York City is Sinking Under its Own Weight

New York City is sinking by up to 2mm every year under the weight of its own buildings

Over 8,000,000 people call New York City home, and there are more than 1.08 million individual buildings in the city’s five boroughs – from single-family houses in Queens to the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan.

And apparently, the weight of those 1.08 million buildings is slowly pushing the Big Apple into the sea.

A recent study claims that New York City is sinking by up to 2mm every year under the weight of its own buildings, and that rising sea levels exacerbate this slow descent.

The researchers at the University of Rhode Island, who authored the study, calculated that all of NYC structures combined weigh 1.68 trillion pounds, or 762 million metric tons.

And while some of the Big Apple’s largest buildings are anchored to the solid bedrock beneath Manhattan, others are built on loosely compacted soil and clay. Some NYC buildings in the latter category are subsiding twice as fast as the former, the scientists explained.

While a subsidence rate of a millimeter per year may be imperceptible to those living in New York, the entire eastern seaboard of the US is subsiding much faster as glacial deposits put down during the last ice age continue to retract. According to earlier research cited by the latest study, this glacial retreat could cause the east coast – including New York – to subside by as much as 1,500mm by 2100.

Combined with a 220mm rise in sea levels recorded around the city since 1950, some of Lower Manhattan, which sits between 1,000mm and 2,000mm above sea level, could be underwater by the end of this century.

More frequent storms and hurricanes, which some scientists attribute to climate change, could also speed up the erosion of soil and damage to buildings, the study, published in the Earth’s Future journal this month, claimed.

“It’s not something to panic about immediately but there’s this ongoing process that increases the risk of inundation from flooding,” Tom Parsons, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey, said in an interview last week.

Thus, New York City authorities “have to get planning for this. If you get repeated exposure to seawater, you can corrode steel and destabilize buildings, which you clearly don’t want. Flooding also kills people, too, which is probably the greatest concern.”