Rising sea level
Experts performed many studies and tried to run a couple of tests to see exactly what was happening with the water levels and therefore with the safety of the city. The things that they’ve discovered aren’t exactly good news.
According to their tests, the sea levels keep rising each year at an alarming speed – twice as fast and strong as the global rate – and it’s expected that this rise will be between 8 to 30 inches by 2050. That might not seem like a lot at first, but if you think about it, it means that the ground floor at different apartment buildings could be underwater sooner or later.
But that is not all, because Mother Nature is definitely not very indulging with us at the moment. Experts identified more frequent rainfall events, which in particular cases could actually be extreme and dangerous, such as hurricanes caused by the climate crisis.
Is the city going to sink?
As I already mentioned at the beginning of this article, New York City is full of skyscrapers that are absolutely gorgeous but very heavy and dangerous for sinking risks in the future.
Experts ran some tests and discovered that there are almost 1,085,000 buildings spread across the 5 districts of the entire city, and they weigh more than we could actually imagine: 762 billion kilograms and that’s a lot of pressure on the water. This is equivalent to approximately 1.9 million completely loaded Boeing 747-400s.
Researchers also made a simulation to see how much damage these massive buildings could create, so they calculated the potential effects and threats of that weight on the ground. When they gathered enough data, they compared the results with the satellite data, which shows the exact situation of the surface geology.
The results don’t seem very bad, with 1 to 2 mm a year, and in different parts, this could go up to 4 1/2 ml per year. Even though it doesn’t seem like a big deal, in the long run, these numbers will add up, and the end story won’t be pretty.
The technical term for the settling or sinking of the earth’s surface caused by artificial or natural reasons is called subsidence. After a study conducted in 2022, experts concluded that 44 of the 48 coastal cities with the highest number of citizens have particular areas that are sinking way faster than sea levels are rising.
Some of the areas that are more likely to sink are Brooklyn, the lower part of Manhattan, and Queens. Researchers said that new construction might be a cause of this phenomenon, but they still need to run some tests to come to a conclusion.
