Fans at the 2026 World Cup games in Mexico City could be forgiven for feeling a little uneasy, and not because of the performance of the athletes on the pitch. In the run-up to and during the matches, commentators noted that the Estadia Azteca—indeed, the city as a whole—has been sinking at an astounding rate of 10 inches per year. One fan came away with a piece of concrete that had crumbled off the 72,000-seat stadium.
It’s a similar story across the metropolitan region, as foundations crack and monuments tilt. At the Catedral Metropolitana, a giant pendulum hovers over the floor of the nave, tracking the steady sinking that has made the bell towers, vaults, and load-bearing walls misaligned and disjointed. Engineers have stabilized the nearly 500-year-old landmark using techniques deployed to shore up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Mexico City is built on an ancient lakebed of clay that is especially prone to compression. But the provincial capital is by no means alone in experiencing what earth scientists call subsidence: the slow and steady collapse of land. It’s happening from Jakarta to Houston to Venice and beyond, and the rate of the sinking—measured more precisely than ever thanks to cutting-edge satellite radar technology—is increasing enough to make many researchers worry about more extensive damage to buildings and infrastructure.
“The land subsidence problem is more widespread than we knew. Almost anywhere we look, some sort of land sinking happens,” said Manoochehr Shirzaei, land subsidence analytics lead at United Nations University and coauthor of a definitive study in 2025 noting that more than 20 percent of land area in 28 US cities is sinking, threatening 29,000 buildings and putting millions of residents at risk. “Even slow rates can accumulate in time and impact infrastructure, and so put in the context of economic exposure, it’s much worse than we thought …. In a few years, you will hear more stories of buildings collapsing, infrastructure failed, pipelines, railways, bridges.”
As with so many perils in these times, climate change is intertwined in the phenomenon. The primary driver of the land subsidence that has been studied in recent years is fluid extraction —oil and gas in some places, but primarily fresh water stored in aquifers underground. Human settlement has increasingly turned to groundwater extraction as other sources of water literally dry up, in rivers and lakes and reservoirs impacted by extreme heat and drought. The withdrawal of so much groundwater contributes to the destabilization of soil.
The problems cascade and compound like so many climate feedback loops, said Shirzai, who is also director of Earth Observation and Innovation at Virgina Tech. Less precipitation leads to lower river discharges, reducing the supply of sediment that shores up land in coastal areas. Melting ice has the effect of lifting land—like a memory foam mattress popping up when weight is removed—but lowering it in peripheral elevations. Sinking land, in turn, exacerbates flooding and vice versa, in an insidious interplay: lower land invites more inundation across a larger area; in turn, the flooding makes the soil even more unstable, potentially leading to more subsidence. “Land subsidence makes everything else worse,” Shirzai said.
Yet subsidence is not recognized in global policy discussions as a primary hazard. Extreme heat and wildfires, seen so vividly in Europe and North America this summer, are tangible evidence of rising temperatures; sea level rise is more incremental, but manifests in flooding in places where the water has previously never reached. Subsidence may be the most hidden and gradual of climate-related perils, creating a singular challenge for scientists trying to sound the alarm before a building collapses or a monument topples.
Why Land Sinks
Scientists studying Earth separate the phenomenon of subsidence into two categories: natural and human-influenced, or anthropogenic. The former encompasses the physical adjustments that the planet has made for millennia, with tectonic plates shifting and pushing up against each other, regularly prompting earthquakes in the most active subduction zones; some land moves up, some sinks down.
The steady retreat of glaciers over thousands of years has also influenced the rising or falling of land. When the thick layer of ice covering the North American plate melted, the removal of all that heavy weight caused much of Canada to rise—but also to sink at the periphery, a process known as glacial isostatic adjustment. Such natural changes generally occur over a broader area and take much longer to become evident, allowing ample time for adaptation by humans, if they are perceptible at all.
In the anthropogenic brand of subsidence, identified in recent years with the help of state-of-the-art satellite mapping technology, the dynamics are different, triggered by a human activity that has increased significantly over the last 100 years: the extraction of groundwater for use by households and agriculture.
Water underground provides pressure, akin to air in a tire, that keeps everything firm and intact. When vast amounts of water are removed—and then not restored adequately by precipitation that normally seeps down to recharge aquifers—soil and sediment get loosened and ultimately compressed, lowering the level of the land above.
If the soil composition, typically clay and sediment layered over bedrock, is unstable to begin with, as in the case of Mexico City, the process can occur more rapidly, and can be even further accelerated by cascading effects and feedback loops. Water mains might break as they are jostled in the shifting environment, for example, flooding underground areas haphazardly. Studies estimate that nearly half of Mexico City’s water supply is lost due to leaks traced to weakened infrastructure.
Temperatures can also rise beneath the surface, sometimes referred to as underground climate change, warming up the stew of ingredients that support buildings and infrastructure and further increasing instability.
Accordingly, the most worrying land subsidence occurring today is at a very local level, often intensifying at the scale of a few blocks of a neighborhood in a city. The 2025 study coauthored by Shirzai identified more than two dozen subsidence hotspots; Houston was found to be the fastest-sinking city in the US, with more than 40 percent of the metropolitan area settling more than five millimeters per year, and some spots sinking at twice that rate. Other fast-sinking zones were found around New York’s LaGuardia Airport and in parts of Las Vegas, Washington, DC, and San Francisco.
The phenomenon can be especially vivid in urban areas, given the weight of buildings, streets, and infrastructure. Everything humans have built in San Francisco, where $100 million was spent to stop a subtle but unmistakable sinking and tilting of the luxury Millennium Tower, weighs 1.6 trillion kilograms.
But subsidence is happening in vast open countryside, too. In the Central Valley, land has sunk an estimated 30 feet since the 1920s, with some hotspots dropping at an unusually high rate of two feet in just one year. The subsidence—closely correlated with drought years, when the most groundwater is pulled out—has complicated plans for high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco and led to decreases in property values of six percent, or $1.8 billion.
Outside the US, subsidence hotspots include Iran and India, as well as Venice, Italy, an infamously popular travel destination grappling with the dual and interrelated challenges of sinking land and sea level rise. Nearly half of China’s major cities are sinking due to groundwater extraction and the weight of urban buildings and infrastructure, according to a 2024 study.
Perhaps the most tangible display of the effects of subsidence has unfolded in Jakarta, whose sinking land has been so inundated by flooding that the Indonesian government decided to relocate its capital, building a new city called Nusantara on the island of Borneo.
What architect and urbanist Sofian Sibarani described as a radical retreat has been criticized by environmental groups as as plan that will not ultimately address the long-term climate resilience of the region, while building on undeveloped land will damage sensitive ecosystems and disrupt Indigenous communities. The public perception has grown that the government has effectively given up on Jakarta without facing up to the problems, including subsidence, that have created such perilous conditions in the first place.
Managing Subsidence
Jakarta’s experience is similar to the managed retreat occurring around the world, in coastal areas so regularly inundated as to become uninhabitable. But the audacious exercise begs the question of what else might be done to manage, mitigate, and adapt to land subsidence.
In a form of triage engineering, one solution is to use a method called deep soil mixing, where a mix of fresh dirt, cement, and sometimes other materials such as lime is injected underground to solidify the subterranean foundation. That requires an elaborate excavation, however, and is by definition a more targeted approach to a problem that stretches for many miles. This method is most commonly used to address discrete sinkholes, the symptom of subsidence often highlighted by local TV news.
New techniques are being explored for more lateral interventions requiring less of an open pit of excavation. But from a practical perspective in urban areas, the challenge is daunting: Workers must delve deep underground and manipulate a mix of unstable materials that could collapse at any moment, all the while with millions of people living and working above.
Above ground, additional triage work has become a familiar feature of the urban landscape: patching, reinforcing, and otherwise shoring up affected buildings and infrastructure. Some forward-looking design professionals are calling for a massive rethinking of architecture to create lighter and more flexible buildings, an approach that has considerable overlap with now-common seismic retrofits to increase resilience during earthquakes.
The authors of a recent World Economic Forum paper recommended that the private sector “must reevaluate and determine best practices that consider the long-term impacts of assets on land subsidence, particularly in cities located near the coast. This should include using materials and techniques that minimize the impact of built assets on vulnerable soils.”
Some take the concept even further, embracing the idea of locational impermanence—a recognition that no building lasts forever, and that virtually all structures require upkeep, maintenance, and the periodic replacement of various components, whether caulking, glazing, or cladding; thus designers should devise structures that acknowledge those realities from the start.
Buildings might be constructed in such a way that they are more flexible, to accommodate disruptive events, said Weston Wright, author of More Water Less Land New Architecture, a treatise on how to help the built environment adapt to climate impacts including flooding and sea level rise. Buildings with a lighter footprint may ultimately even be moved or disassembled, he suggests: “The architecture is able to be relocated to evade harm.”
Given that the single biggest factor in land subsidence is groundwater extraction, however, researchers and policy analysts say that should be the focus of efforts to address the problem.
The reliance on water from underground aquifers is of course part of the larger story of water and land in the United States and around the world. Both human settlement and agriculture have had to turn to groundwater because of severe shortages in surface sources of water, like rivers and reservoirs, fueled by snowmelt and precipitation that has been disjointed by climate change.
The unprecedented stress on systems like the Colorado River basin, which has once again been subject to emergency distribution measures this year, has left many communities desperate to keep the taps running. New demands from data centers, which require huge amounts of water to cool their computing equipment, are only adding to the problem.
Looming water shortages have prompted many out-of-the-box proposals, from moving crops closer to water sources such as the Great Lakes, to seeding clouds for more rainfall, to desalinating ocean water.
Near-term, however, the best option for most communities has been to draw from groundwater. But as a matter of basic math, aggressively tapping into underground aquifers—already notoriously sensitive, needing to be recharged regularly to maintain a form of equilibrium—is simply unsustainable, according to Mary Ann Dickinson, founder of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the efficient and sustainable use of water in the US and Canada.
“Fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that we have just pumped too much groundwater, and not paid any attention to what was not going back in,” said Dickinson, who was policy director of land and water for the Lincoln Institute for the last two years, focused on the integration of land and water policy in the United States and globally. “It’s like your checking account. The money that comes in pays the bills … but if you are writing checks for more than what’s coming in, you’re in a deficit mode. It’s exactly that way in water deliveries.”
First and foremost, Dickinson said, there must be strict monitoring of how much groundwater is being withdrawn. This is already required in some states including California, in an effort to keep tabs on supplies and understand when overuse could lead to subsidence.
Conservation—essentially a reduction on the demand side—then holds the most promise for halting the trend of depleted aquifers and land subsidence, according to an emerging consensus.
Advances in technology, facilitated by artificial intelligence, allow farmers to squeeze the most out of irrigation water and match crops with the exact amount of watering they need and no more. (That artificial intelligence, of course, is made possible by the aforementioned resource-intensive data centers.) Scientists and water managers are exploring new techniques to return more excess water to aquifers through targeted injections in what is known as aquifer recharge management.
Households can also save millions of gallons through steps such as turning lawns into native planting meadows, converting to low-flush toilets, and recycling wastewater. A study completed this year by the Water Research Foundation documented that household water use since 1999 has been reduced by 44 percent through water efficiency codes and programs.
Dickinson points to Houston as a place that soberly took stock of its subsidence problem and moved forward with effective water management measures. Unlike other places, where the sinking is so gradual as to be imperceptible, the land subsidence in the flood-prone, largest city in Texas was palpable.
“Most places don’t realize—they don’t have a historical perspective on how much has actually sunk. But in Houston, they did, and they could see that they were losing a lot of valuable land that they needed to protect,” Dickinson said. “They created a subsidence district, and it’s the only one that I know of in the country, where they are actively working to reduce subsidence and to reduce overextraction of the groundwater.
“So there are some answers,” she said. “But I think it comes down to better monitoring—and paying attention to that checkbook.”
Measuring Subsidence with Interferometry
As in modern medicine or sports replays, big advances in technology have been critical in understanding what’s happening to the planet. Subsidence can be precisely measured using sophisticated geospatial mapping techniques. The science of interferometry compares radar signals over time to measure how much the land has moved. One of the most promising systems, known as NISAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), was launched into space in 2025 by NASA in partnership with the Indian Space Research Organisation. The technology, according to NASA, allows researchers to track not only land subsidence but broader changes in ecosystems and agricultural crops, glaciers and ice sheets, and other indications of how the Earth’s surface is moving.
That technological leap comes on the heels of GRACE, another deployment of NASA satellites with partners including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has for two decades measured Earth’s gravity field changes, water reservoirs, groundwater storage, and rapidly changing dynamics of land, ice, and oceans. “We’re seeing a remarkable expansion in what can be observed from space, from land deformation and groundwater change to changes in wetlands and other ecosystems,” said Sara Alonso Vicario, water data engineer at the Center for Geospatial Solutions. As this ecosystem of data grows, she said, “the true challenge isn’t simply collecting more data, it’s combining those observations with local data, models, and new tools like AI to make sense of what we’re seeing.”
Anthony Flint is a former senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Pedestrians near Mexico City’s Catedral Metropolitana. The cathedral is steadily sinking, along with other parts of the city. Source: VladimirGerasimov/iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.
