New York City Sinking Under Weight of Skyscrapers
New York City Sinking Under Weight of Skyscrapers - Yale E360
New York City. Pexels
New York City is sinking under the weight of its massive buildings, leaving it more vulnerable to rising seas, a new study finds.
Most coastal cities are slowly sinking as the earth beneath them settles and groundwater is drained away. In some metropolises, the weight of large, concrete-and-steel skyscrapers may be hastening this slump, but experts rarely, if ever, account for the mass of large buildings in projections of future sinking.
For the new study, scientists tallied the weight of every building in New York, which they put at 842 million tons, and estimated the downward force of these structures across the city. They found that buildings are leaving a bigger imprint in areas rich in clay than in areas where sand or bedrock predominate.
“The softer the soil, the more compression there is from the buildings,” lead author Tom Parsons, of the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Guardian. “It wasn’t a mistake to build such large buildings in New York, but we’ve just got to keep in mind every time you build something there you push down the ground a little bit more.”
Accounting for the weight of buildings, scientists estimate that New York is sinking by around 1 to 2 millimeters yearly, though some areas are sinking much faster. Their findings were published in the journal Earth’s Future.
Parsons said that cities must plan for future sinking, which will exacerbate the impact of rising seas. “It’s not something to panic about immediately,” he said, “but there’s this ongoing process that increases the risk of inundation from flooding.”
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Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.