Like many coastal cities around the world, New York City is sinking. On a year-to-year basis, the rate of its descent into the Earth is practically imperceptible, but over time those millimeters add up: Today, the city is 9 inches lower than it was in 1950 — a number that has serious implications for waterfront neighborhoods that are having to reckon with increasingly extreme storms.
Sea level rise isn't the only culprit behind the sink. The city is also being literally weighed down by its massive skyscrapers. The influence of those trillions of pounds of steel and concrete on the city's rate of sinking is the subject of a paper, published earlier this month in the scientific journal Earth's Future.
