New York City Is Sinking. It’s Far From Alone

Add up the million or so buildings in New York City, and you get something on the order of 1.7 trillion pounds of weight pressing on the earth—and that’s not even counting all the other infrastructure, like roads and sidewalks. All that weight is deforming the ground, like bowling balls on a memory foam mattress, and causing a type of sinking known as subsidence, when land slowly compresses. New research finds that, on average, subsidence rates in NYC are between 1 and 2 millimeters per year, but in some places...