It's steadily sinking or subsiding, which is destabilizing levees, roads, and airports.
Unless you’re sinking into quicksand, you might assume that the land beneath your feet is solid and unmoving. In actual fact, your part of the world may well be undergoing “subsidence,” which is where the ground collapses as sediments settle or when people over-extract groundwater. New York City is sinking, too, due to the weight of all those buildings pushing on the ground. In extreme cases, like in California’s agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet.
Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities.
In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence—due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors—for those communities and their infrastructure. Using satellite measurements, they have found that up to 74,000 square kilometers (29,000 square miles) of the Atlantic Coast are exposed to subsidence of up to 2 millimeters (0.079 inches) a year, affecting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. And over 3,700 square kilometers along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That’s an even faster change than sea-level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year. (In the map below, warmer colors represent more subsidence, up to 6 millimeters.)
…
A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper. The social forces are relentless, too, as more people around the world move to coastal cities, creating even more demand for groundwater. “There are processes that are sometimes even cyclic, for example in summers you pump a lot more water so land subsides rapidly in a short period of time,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and coauthor of the paper. “That causes large areas to subside below a threshold that leads the water to flood a large area.” When it comes to flooding, falling elevation of land is a tipping element that has been largely ignored by research so far, Shirzaei says.
Shit. In round numbers, that is a foot in 34 years (assumes a constant rate, which is unlikely.)
Either I'm getting extremely old and becoming a boomer but 1 ft every 34 years doesn't seem like a problem for most people.
Maybe the companies that own coastal properties. And if anything, properties on the coast tend to be wealthy anyways. So they have the financial resources to deal with it.
Get down to the part where it's happening inconstantly even across small pieces of ground. 34 years is a short time for a building foundation.
In isolation it might not be. The problem is that 1 foot drop isn't the only thing happening. Over the same period, the sea level would be expected to rise a foot also. 2 feet is the difference between a resort and an underwater hotel lobby in many areas.
Sure, that might only affect the rich property owners, but you can bet the Florida taxpayers will be the ones footing the bill to ensure Miami still exists for our grandchildren.