A recent study published by the “Financial Times” newspaper revealed that 25 American cities, including Houston, Fort Worth and Dallas, are facing the risk of drowning due to ground decline and climate change, which may lead to their disappearance under the surface of the sea in the coming years.
The study showed that the “land landing problem” is not limited to coastal areas only, as sea level rises due to climate change, but also includes the interior, as the extraction of groundwater leads to the lumen of the sediment under the surface, while urban development increases pressure on the Earth, which causes gradual decline.
This drop can weaken infrastructure such as buildings and bridges, increases the risk of floods and reduces the ability of groundwater layers to keep water.
The researchers used data from the Sultan-1 satellite that were collected between 2015 and 2021, compared the echoes taken at different times over 28 American cities, to find that 25 of them showed a continuous decline instead of height.
While some Houston regions record more than 10 mm annually, cities such as Jakarta and Tehran suffer from a more severe drop, up to 15 cm and 31 cm annually, respectively, prompting countries like Indonesia to transfer its capitals to avoid the effects of this phenomenon.
And estimates indicate that about 2 billion people live in areas affected by the global landfills, which prompted some experts to describe it as a “crisis of drowning”, which is impressed by climate change and population growth.
