The world’s megacities that are sinking 10 times faster than water levels are rising

Scientists have issued a new warning to the world’s coastal megacities that the threat from subsiding land is a more immediate problem than rising sea levels caused by global warming.

 

A new paper from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands published in April identified regions of the globe where the ground level is falling 10 times faster than water levels are rising – with human activity often to blame.

In Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest city, the population has grown from around half a million in the 1930s to just under 10 million today, with heavily populated areas dropping by as much as six and a half feet as groundwater is pumped up from the Earth to drink.

The same practice led to Tokyo’s ground level falling by two meters before new restrictions were introduced, and in Venice, this sort of extraction has only compounded the effects of natural subsidence caused by long-term geological processes.

 

Tags: coastal, climate change, urban, megacities, water, environment, urban ecology.

Source: www.independent.co.uk

If people paid more attention to the way they are treating their immediate area, it would go a very long way to creating better conditions world wide.  Instead, so many are fixated on the impending doom of "man-made global warming" that they don’t keep their own back yard clean.

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