New York City is buckling under the weight of its own, and among the first areas to be hit by such a tragedy are LaGuardia Airport, Arthur Ashe Stadium and Coney Island, according to a recent NASA report. New York City’s five boroughs are sinking faster than the city as a whole, which is sinking at a rate of 1.6 millimeters per year, according to research conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Rutgers University.
According to research published in Science Advances, between 2016 and 2023, the US Open Venue-Arthur Ashe Stadium and the runways at LaGuardia Airport fell the most, at 3.7 and 4.6 millimeters per year, respectively. These two sites may have sunk the fastest because they were both built on previous landfills.
Furthermore, the threat of the city sinking is exacerbated by rising sea levels. Hurricanes and extratropical storms have caused coastal flooding in the city, among other things. One of the examples is Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which devastated the city.
“Protecting coastal populations and assets from coastal flooding is an ongoing challenge for New York City. The combined effect of natural sea level variations and destructive storms is increasingly exacerbated by continued sea level rise,” the researchers wrote in the report.
NASA research also added that Interstate 78, which runs through the Holland Tunnel connecting Manhattan to New Jersey, also sinks at nearly double the rate of the rest of the city. The southern half of Governors Island, Midland and South Beach on Staten Island and Arverne by the Sea, a coastal neighborhood in southern Queens, are also sinking faster.
The report was released after the United States Geological Survey found earlier this year that the New York metro area’s more than 1 million buildings weigh nearly 1.7 trillion pounds and that the city was gradually collapsing under its own weight. The report stated that the city was sinking at a rate of 1 to 2 milliliters per year. The researchers arrived at the result by comparing the geology beneath the city with satellite data showing its footprint.
“New York faces significant challenges from flood hazards; the threat of sea level rise is 3 to 4 times higher than the global average along the Atlantic coast of North America… A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of flood danger in New York City,” lead researcher and geologist Tom Parsons of the United States Geological Survey wrote in the report in May.
The team of researchers calculated the cumulative mass of the more than 1 million buildings in New York City, which came to 764,000,000,000 kilograms, or 1.68 trillion pounds. They divided the city into a grid of 100 by 100 meter squares and converted the building mass into downward pressure by taking into account the pull of gravity. Increased urbanization, including groundwater drainage and pumping, could only worsen New York’s subsidence problem, the researchers previously warned.