All 28 of the U.S.’s Largest Cities Are Sinking, Study Finds

America’s biggest cities are slowly sinking—and not just the ones near the ocean, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Cities. The satellite-based study shows that all 28 U.S. cities with over 600,000 people are subsiding, putting infrastructure in fast-growing urban areas increasingly at risk. Researchers used satellite data to investigate the vertical land movements in large U.S. cities, finding that all of them are sinking to some extent. Groundwater extraction seems to be the most common culprit, and its impact on land movement has direct implications for the infrastructure in the country’s most populated neighborhoods. “As cities continue to grow, we will see more cities expand into subsiding regions,” Leonard Ohenhen, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a university statement. “Over time, this subsidence can produce stresses on infrastructure that will go past their s ... Read full article.