New York City Is Sinking under Its Own Weight – Scientific American

Empire: New York City from the Statue to the Brooklyn and beyond (by the Explorographer CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

The weight of New York City’s 1.1 million buildings is making the city slowly sink.

Home to 8.8 million people as of 2020, New York City is by far the most populous city in the U.S. And the mass of the buildings needed to support all those residents—and the work they do—really adds up. New research published on May 8 in Earth’s Future suggests that the weight of the city itself is pressing down on the land it occupies and contributing to local sea-level rise that increases flood risks…