The city that never sleeps slowly sinks every year. New research suggests the city is sinking 1mm to 2mm each year, an accepted subsidence, and has been plaguing New York since the end of the last ice age.

This process should occur naturally, but in New York the sheer weight of the buildings accelerates the collapse. There are more than a million buildings in the city, and their collective weight is estimated at 1.7 trillion tons, made of concrete, glass and metal, according to estimates from the US Geological Survey. While the entire city is slowly sinking, different areas are sinking in different ways.

This varying subsidence has to do with how the capital of the world is built. As the population grew, the city ran out of space to house its citizens and created a lot of waste. The terrain of the city was a swamp, so there were parts of the city that were uninhabitable. The increase in landfill caused by the number of people began to create new land to build on. Thanks to that, New York has had the capacity to grow. Parts built on top of garbage or man-made rocks sink faster than other parts.

While the weight of the city is a factor in how quickly the city sinks, it’s not the biggest cause. This is a natural process of the earth, which expands at one time, creating more land, and at other times, like this season, causes it to sink.

New York is not the only city affected by this phenomenon, it also occurs in cities in other countries such as Venice (Italy), Jakarta (Indonesia), Mexico City (Mexico) and parts of the Netherlands.

Rising sea level

Another big factor influences the current situation of the city: the rising sea level; part of that picture is the melting of the poles due to climate change. While New York City is sinking 1-2 mm per year, sea levels are rising 3-4 mm. This means that in the future, due to the relative sea level, parts of the city will be flooded.

“BIG U” project by Bjarke Ingels company BIG for New York.

BIG U

Today, city officials are tasked with creating infrastructure that can protect the city and its residents from flooding. One of the projects proposed after the tragic Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York and caused at least 50 deaths in 2012, it was BIG Uof the BIG architectural group of Bjarke Ingels.

The proposal is to build a six-mile protection system around Manhattan, which would protect the city from flooding.

The Big U is a coastal protection project that extends about 10 miles from West 57th Street to The Battery in the south, and from there to East 42nd Street, which are divided into three sections that operate independently. At the same time, this project will transform those areas into spaces for the communities, taking into account their specific needs.

While the city must continue to find ways to innovate its infrastructure and cope with the floods that are predicted, it is estimated that people will have to move in a hundred years as the world’s capital will continue to sink.