Cities around the world are sinking at ‘worrying speed’

[dognose]

Twenty-two years ago, when Erna stood outside her house, “the windows were as high as my chest”. Now they’re knee-height.

As their home has sunk, she and her family have had to cope with frequent flooding. In the most extreme cases “we used canoes - the water kept coming in and swamped the ground floor”, she says.

Erna lives in the Indonesian capital Jakarta - one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. Her home is in one of the worst-affected areas, the north of the city, and is now much lower than the road.

The 37-year-old grew up here and remembers playing in nearby streets and praying in the mosque - that is now long gone, permanently underwater, as is the old port.

The walls of her home, built in the 1970s, are cracked, and you can see where thick layers of concrete have been added to the floor to try to restore it to ground level - about 10 times since it was built, and a metre thick in some places. The house is still subsiding, and Erna can’t afford to move.

This is one of dozens of coastal regions that are sinking at a worrying speed, according to a study by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

The team studied subsidence in and around 48 coastal cities in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. These are places that are particularly vulnerable to a combination of rising sea levels, which are mainly driven by climate change, and sinking land.

Based on the study and population data from the United Nations, the BBC estimates that nearly 76 million people live in parts of these cities that subsided, on average, at least 1cm per year between 2014 and 2020.

The impact on their lives can be huge - for example in Tianjin in north-east China, 3,000 people were evacuated from high-rise apartment buildings in 2023, after subsidence left large cracks in nearby streets.

All 48 urban areas in the NTU study are shown in this globe. The most extreme cases of subsidence were seen in Tianjin, which has undergone rapid industrial and infrastructural development this century. The worst-hit parts of the city sank up to 18.7cm per year between 2014 and 2020.

READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN AND SELECT CITITES TO GET SPECIFIC SINKING INFORMATION ON HERE

 

[Tesorodeoro]

I don’t worry about things I can’t change. They just are.

This old gal and the humans that live off her have survived much worse, environmental changes

 

[achanceforgold]

Twenty-two years ago, when Erna stood outside her house, “the windows were as high as my chest”. Now they’re knee-height.

As their home has sunk, she and her family have had to cope with frequent flooding. In the most extreme cases “we used canoes - the water kept coming in and swamped the ground floor”, she says.

Erna lives in the Indonesian capital Jakarta - one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. Her home is in one of the worst-affected areas, the north of the city, and is now much lower than the road.

The 37-year-old grew up here and remembers playing in nearby streets and praying in the mosque - that is now long gone, permanently underwater, as is the old port.

The walls of her home, built in the 1970s, are cracked, and you can see where thick layers of concrete have been added to the floor to try to restore it to ground level - about 10 times since it was built, and a metre thick in some places. The house is still subsiding, and Erna can’t afford to move.

This is one of dozens of coastal regions that are sinking at a worrying speed, according to a study by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

The team studied subsidence in and around 48 coastal cities in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. These are places that are particularly vulnerable to a combination of rising sea levels, which are mainly driven by climate change, and sinking land.

Based on the study and population data from the United Nations, the BBC estimates that nearly 76 million people live in parts of these cities that subsided, on average, at least 1cm per year between 2014 and 2020.

The impact on their lives can be huge - for example in Tianjin in north-east China, 3,000 people were evacuated from high-rise apartment buildings in 2023, after subsidence left large cracks in nearby streets.

All 48 urban areas in the NTU study are shown in this globe. The most extreme cases of subsidence were seen in Tianjin, which has undergone rapid industrial and infrastructural development this century. The worst-hit parts of the city sank up to 18.7cm per year between 2014 and 2020.

READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN AND SELECT CITITES TO GET SPECIFIC SINKING INFORMATION ON HERE

I'm pretty sure human settlements along the coastlines and rivers have been sinking since the end of the ice age.
We lost a whole city in North Carolina last year after the hurricane.
Chimney Rock. In the Appalachian Mountains.

Mother Nature is not as fragile as people think.
She will do whatever she wants, when she wants.

 

[Limitool]

achanceforgold: "Mother Nature is not as fragile as people think. She will do whatever she wants, when she wants."

Agreed... But there are folks who absolutely love to blame mankind now for all bad weather happenings.

 

[achanceforgold]

achanceforgold: "Mother Nature is not as fragile as people think. She will do whatever she wants, when she wants."

Agreed... But there are folks who absolutely love to blame mankind now for all bad weather happenings.

They should look at the Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300.
Much warmer temperatures than we have today.
Prosperity throughout Europe, Crops grow almost year around.
Not sure why everyone wants to be cold all the time.
The dinosaurs did very well with global warming.
Grow to enormous sizes.


I assure you. If New York had the Same Increased Temperatures as Florida.
It would be a much nicer place to visit.

 

[UnderMiner]

According to that movie Snow Piercer, and we all know the predictions of Hollywood to be pretty darn accurate, the global elite will seek to mitigate global warming by putting some reflective stuff in the atmosphere and accidentally induce a global ice age killing 99.9% of humanity.

 

[tamrock]

Could be the Lord don't like it cuz it ain't pretty

 

[Red-Coat]

Although rising sea levels aren’t helping, there’s a particular reason why Jakarta is sinking, although this is not true of all the coastal cities mentioned. Jakarta is built on swampland from which there is excessive extraction of groundwater for domestic and industrial use.

The water management authorities are only supplying about 40% of the city’s needs and the rest is coming from poorly regulated pumping from underground aquifers. The city is sitting on a deflating balloon and subsiding at an ever-increasing rate as the water is pumped out.

Everyone from individual homeowners to large industrial premises are carrying out their own extractions to supplement their supply because they have no choice, and many are taking much more than allowed, or have no permit to do so.

The local government has only recently admitted it has a problem with illegal groundwater extraction. In May, the Jakarta city authority inspected 80 buildings in Central Jakarta's Jalan Thamrin, a road lined with skyscrapers, shopping malls and hotels. It found that 56 buildings had their own groundwater pump and 33 were extracting water illegally, without a permit.

It’s recognised that stronger enforcement is needed, but Jakarta is going to need to halt all groundwater extraction by 2050 to avoid a major subsidence, and that will need huge investment in infrastructure to meet the city’s needs from rain and river water or new dams and reservoirs (and the rivers running though the area are heavily polluted).

Technology (known as ‘artificial recharge’) exists to replace groundwater deep at its source but it's also extremely expensive. It was employed in Tokyo 50 years ago together with restrictions on groundwater extraction and increased use of recycled water to successfully halt the city’s subsidence.