New York Sinking Under The Weight Of Its Skyscrapers, Says Study

New York is sinking and its skyscrapers are bringing it down, a new study has claimed. The research has warned that the weight of the city's skyscrapers is causing New York to sink lower into its surrounding bodies of water - a phenomenon known as subsidence. New York Post said that more than 1 million buildings in New York weigh nearly 1.7 trillion pounds. The research has been carried out by US Geological Survey and geologists at the University of Rhode Island.

The study has been published in the journal Earth's Future.

The city is sinking at the rate of 1-2 millimetres per year, the researchers found. They arrived at the result by comparing the geology beneath the city to satellite data showing its footprint.

Some of the areas, like Lower Manhattan, are subsiding much faster, the researchers further said. There is concern for both Brooklyn and Queens as well.

"New York faces significant challenges from flood hazard; 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 hazard from inundation in New York City," lead researcher and geologist Tom Parsons of the United States Geological Survey wrote in the new report.

Mr Parsons said he expects the findings should encourage further efforts to develop mitigation strategies to counter growing flood risk and rising sea levels.

"The point of the paper is to raise awareness that every additional high-rise building constructed at coastal, river, or lakefront settings could contribute to future flood risk," he said in the report.

Explaining the methodology, Science Alert said that the team of researchers calculated the cumulative mass of the more than 1 million buildings in New York City, which worked out to be 764,000,000,000 kilograms or 1.68 trillion pounds.

They the divided the city into a grid of 100-by-100-metre squares and converted building mass to downward pressure by factoring in gravity's pull.

The researchers left out roads, sidewalks, bridges, railways and other paved areas, focussing only on buildings.

Increased urbanization, including the draining and pumping of groundwater, could only add to New York's subsidence problem, the researchers warned.