The Land is Steadily Sinking Up and Down America's Atlantic Coast (arstechnica.com) 85
In Jakarta, Indonesia, "the land is sinking nearly a foot a year because of collapsing aquifers," reports Wired. "Accordingly, within the next three decades, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be underwater."
"Subsidence" is caused by over-extracting groundwater, or the settling of sediments — and it's not just happening in Indonesia. "In California's agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet." Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities. In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence — due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors — for those communities and their infrastructure... [O]ver 3,700 square kilometers [1,428 square miles] along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That's an even faster change than sea-level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year...
A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper... The researchers selected 10 levees on the Atlantic Coast and found that all were impacted by subsidence of at least 1 millimeter a year. That puts at risk something like 46,000 people, 27,000 buildings, and $12 billion worth of property. But they note that the actual population and property at risk of exposure behind the 116 East Coast levees vulnerable to subsidence could be two to three times greater. "Levees are heavy, and when they're set on land that's already subsiding, it can accelerate that subsidence," says independent scientist Natalie Snider, who studies coastal resilience but wasn't involved in the new research. "It definitely can impact the integrity of the protection system and lead to failures that can be catastrophic...."
The study finds that subsidence is highly variable along the Atlantic Coast, both regionally and locally, as different stretches have different geology and topography, and different rates of groundwater extraction. It's looking particularly problematic for several communities, like Virginia Beach, where 451,000 people and 177,000 properties are at risk. In Baltimore, Maryland, it's 826,000 people and 335,000 properties, while in NYC — in Queens, Bronx, and Nassau — that leaps to 5 million people and 1.8 million properties.
Highways, airports, and even railway tracks could also be affected....
"Subsidence" is caused by over-extracting groundwater, or the settling of sediments — and it's not just happening in Indonesia. "In California's agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet." Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities. In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence — due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors — for those communities and their infrastructure... [O]ver 3,700 square kilometers [1,428 square miles] along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That's an even faster change than sea-level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year...
A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper... The researchers selected 10 levees on the Atlantic Coast and found that all were impacted by subsidence of at least 1 millimeter a year. That puts at risk something like 46,000 people, 27,000 buildings, and $12 billion worth of property. But they note that the actual population and property at risk of exposure behind the 116 East Coast levees vulnerable to subsidence could be two to three times greater. "Levees are heavy, and when they're set on land that's already subsiding, it can accelerate that subsidence," says independent scientist Natalie Snider, who studies coastal resilience but wasn't involved in the new research. "It definitely can impact the integrity of the protection system and lead to failures that can be catastrophic...."
The study finds that subsidence is highly variable along the Atlantic Coast, both regionally and locally, as different stretches have different geology and topography, and different rates of groundwater extraction. It's looking particularly problematic for several communities, like Virginia Beach, where 451,000 people and 177,000 properties are at risk. In Baltimore, Maryland, it's 826,000 people and 335,000 properties, while in NYC — in Queens, Bronx, and Nassau — that leaps to 5 million people and 1.8 million properties.
Highways, airports, and even railway tracks could also be affected....
Only matters to the rich! (Score:3)
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In a few hundred years I'll have oceanfront property!
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On a more serious note, taking water out of the ground will surely have an effect. I do not know why nuclear powered desalination isnt a thing. You wouldn't need to even get nuclear electricity. Just use the heat to boil the water, and use the incoming cold water to cool down the steam. Viola. Instant desal. Every country should be doing this at massive scale. The salt should be stored deep underground so the oceans dont remain quite so salty foreve
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I do not know why nuclear powered desalination isnt a thing.
Because it is very, very expensive and also tends to poison the sea.
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Not it fucking doesn't. The amount of brine piped out through a leaky pipe a couple miles long along the seabed has an insubstantial effect on marine life. Yes, a full termination of a intact system can cause local salt levels to be high enough to be a problem, but people don't use those for desal plants for a long time.
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Yes, it fucking will if you want "nuclear".
I read in your Pediwikia that the current total output of desalinated water is some measly 87 million cubic meters a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is a ridiculously miniscule amount.
I currently shovel about 150 cubic meters of coolant second through one of my reactor cores (3GWt thermal). This makes something like 1300-1500 tons of superheated steam at ~7MPa/280C an hour. It can probably produce upwards of 20x that much steam at 110C and atmospheric
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One correction, >100Mt is a worldwide daily, not yearly. Doesn't really change the argument that much, if normalized by the volume needed per unit of brine.
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Latent heat of water is 334J/g ... 3GWt should produce around 3e9/750/1e6*60*60 = 14400 ton of steam from 10c water an hour. So off by two there too, though not as bad as off by a 356 ;)
Israel alone does a couple Megaton a day, with no huge brine problems. Ocean coastlines will have less trouble than the Mediterranean.
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Not my fault that pediwikia is formatted like shit.
What's the capacity of the biggest desalination installation in Israel?
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Because it is very, very expensive
Compared to reverse osmosis, distilled water is much more expensive to produce.
and also tends to poison the sea.
No. The sun has been evaporating water and dumping it on the land for billions of years. Adding 0.001% additional clean water and salt separation will NOT poison the oceans.
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Just for once, an AC who actually gets to the important point, and does it correctly.
Distillation - however you generate the heat, involves changing the phase of the water, and all phase changes for water have abnormally (compared to analogous molecules in the periodic table) high specific (i.e., per kilogramme) latent heats. Yes, you can recover some of that with a suitable working fluid, but t
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But now we can collect that salt and make electric vehicle batteries [slashdot.org] out of it. See? The two problems practically solve each other. If everyone used their brain more for problem solving and less for merely being destructively contrarian, the world would be a much better place.
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There is no "salt" to collect. Typically, the output of a desalination plant is brine, which in the large amounts that would be expected, will endanger marine life over a huge area.
No "ev batteries" either.
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There is no "salt" to collect. Typically, the output of a desalination plant is brine
Well I'm fascinated. Tell us more about this brine which somehow does not contain salt.
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Imagine this, when "salt" gets into contact with water, it dissociates into a kind of "atoms", called "ions", which go their separate ways encircled by small water particles called "molecules".
That thing, mixed with many other kinds of shit is called "brine".
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OR people who eat! (Score:2)
Seems to be happening in lots of places, including the vegetable basket of America: the San Joaquin valley. 10ft in some places west of Mendota see the worst.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/publicat... [usgs.gov]
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Or those who lived in reclaimed flood plains built during the housing boom of the 1950's.
People tend to focus on global warming... (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is a reminder that humans can significantly impact the earth in other ways as well. Subsidence caused by groundwater extraction can dwarf both AGW-related sea level rise, and also subsidence related to deglaciation (areas that were close to, but weren't covered by, ice sheets often subside in concert with the uplift seen in the formerly glaciated areas).
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Not really, but the time-scales are different. Both cannot be fixed in any useful time-frame. Stopping or delaying is the only thing that can be done. Would require that a lot more people recognize the danger and are willing to do something about it. That is obviously not going to happen anytime soon. Also, obviously, once the problem becomes impossible to ignore, the same people will look for somebody else to accuse of being responsible.
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Not really, but the time-scales are different.
Yeah, my phrasing was a bit sloppy there. I meant what we observe in a relatively short period of time (like a few decades).
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Ok, accepted. In fact, some catastrophes from this may well wake people up to the dangers of messing with not short-term renewable resources. A bit late, though.
Ogallala aquifer... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think the people of the USA realise just how fucked their future food security is...
Those Great plains and their wonderful agricultural engine... not looking too stable in the long term.
Re:Ogallala aquifer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. We don't teach history anymore.
Those Great Plains you refer to were called the Dust Bowl a century ago.
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Sigh. The Dust Bowl was human caused agricultural methods overlaid by a drought. The Bowl went away mainly because people stopped growing the wrong crops in the wrong places with no water. Sucking the Ogallala dry isn't really related in a "the Dust Bowl wet away because of irrigation".
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that's not where the U.S. "bread basket" is, and that prime farmland is fed by rain.
Meanwhile, the "greenies" in California have a perfect and relatively application for solar energy, I suggest they get right on that.
Re:Ogallala aquifer... (Score:5, Insightful)
The people of the US generally realize pretty much nothing, even when it starts to bite them. To be fair, other areas of the planet are not any better in that regard. People are generally without insight and without ability to fact-check whatever crude believes they have adopted.
Only about 20% can be convinced by rational argument and only about 10-15% are independent thinkers and can come up with such arguments by themselves. Yes, it is really _that_ bad and it is not something education can fix. Explains a lot, though.
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The people of the US generally realize pretty much nothing, even when it starts to bite them. To be fair, other areas of the planet are not any better in that regard. People are generally without insight and without ability to fact-check whatever crude believes they have adopted.
Only about 20% can be convinced by rational argument and only about 10-15% are independent thinkers and can come up with such arguments by themselves. Yes, it is really _that_ bad and it is not something education can fix. Explains a lot, though.
Well, its just this "We're on top of the world and can bend any nation to our will because our huge gigantic penis-weapons and dick-waving-economy" attitude, its going to take a hard hard dive.
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Fun fact about "projecting" military power over a long distance: Even the US cannot really do it except for the occasional stunt. And the US economy? The way they are preparing for climate change (or rather not preparing), that will be history before half the century is over.
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Even the US cannot really do it except for the occasional stunt.
Projecting power is what nuclear aircraft carriers are for. That power can be used to make hydrogen fuel for our proxy wars in the desert. Or synfuel I suppose, but the return is less. Either way it will make projection of power more viable due to reduction of supply necessity. As Russia has been demonstrating, ability to deliver fuel to the front is one of the biggest problems a modern military faces.
No nation on the planet is doing enough to address climate change from an economic standpoint. Most people
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Fun fact about "projecting" military power over a long distance: Even the US cannot really do it except for the occasional stunt.
Ignoring the whole "World War II" thing (which is the textbook case of "America can and will fuck your shit up no matter where on earth you may be") ten years in Vietnam and twenty in Iraq and Afghanistan seem, to me, to qualify as a bit more than "occasional stunts."
Of course, we've got nothing on the British who "projected power" continuously for centuries. Or the Spanish before them.
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Fun fact about "projecting" military power over a long distance: Even the US cannot really do it except for the occasional stunt.
Ignoring the whole "World War II" thing (which is the textbook case of "America can and will fuck your shit up no matter where on earth you may be") ten years in Vietnam and twenty in Iraq and Afghanistan seem, to me, to qualify as a bit more than "occasional stunts."
Of course, we've got nothing on the British who "projected power" continuously for centuries. Or the Spanish before them.
The USA rarely goes a decade without being involved in a major war somewhere on the planet. They play the old Civ 'democratic ostrich' and come out of their safe 'island' to beat down other civilisations 'for fun and profit'. About time they had some conflict on their own territory, just so their people can see just what its like to have their lives fucked up by war.
Re:Ogallala aquifer... (Score:4)
As long as the rest of the planet is warlike that will continue, because our MIC is powered in large part by foreign arms sales. The US Government is the world's largest arms dealer.
Re:Ogallala aquifer... (Score:5, Informative)
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Boo hoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Not gonna cry for US owners of oceanfront property. Sorry not sorry. You fenced off the ocean.
Dozens of feet? What will we do without Florida? Oh, yeah. Florida swampland has been a real estate joke since the 1920's. You can't be affected unless you spent your life accelerating climate change. I'm sure it will make a nice SCUBA park.
Other countries where they park their slums on the beach I might worry about. If the land goes down and the ocean goes up it's important to teach your children how to swim.
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If the land goes down and the ocean goes up it's important to teach your children how to swim.
And that is supposed to help with the overpopulation problem how, exactly?
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The crazy thing is, the ocean hasn't actually risen at all, and the land hasn't subducted, since the 1980s. There's been plenty of erosion, though, because we've eliminated our natural barriers in favor of oceanfront beaches.
Been going on for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably in the early 80s I remember as a kid reading in the old National Geographic magazine a story about the sinking of the land above the Ogallala Aquifer. It showed a marker post in the ground indicating the height where the land used to be.
Re:Been going on for a while (Score:4, Informative)
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Not just groundwater (Score:2)
The sheer weight of cities is pushing down the land like pressing on a lump of clay. It has been sinking under NYC for decades a tiny bit every year.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Solar powered desalination (Score:5, Informative)
The irony of over-extracting groundwater when you're sitting right next to the ocean is crazy when you remember that desalination is a process that can be powered by solar.
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Same old story. Cheaper, tragedy of the commons etc.
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Until the last year or so, solar desalination at scale was infeasible. Now with the breakthroughs in 2023 it looks much better... but it hasn't been proven at large scale yet. Large scale desalination has historically needed huge amounts of energy, which is why (surprise surprise) the middle eastern oil heavyweights are the largest consumers.
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And that water will have to be pumped over a mountain range ... not cheap at all.
If the farmers can't get their water cheap, their product is not price competitive
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We're using up the planet (Score:2)
and we can't stop. It was good while it lasted.
Re:We're using up the planet (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, this one is particularly stupid. "You are sucking so much water out of the ground, the ground is sinking below sea level".
You would think the rational response would be, "Hey, maybe we better not suck the aquifer dry faster than it is replenished naturally and if that means finding other sources or rationing water... that's better than being submerged in salt water".
But nope. And this is on a time scale people can see easily within their own lifetime. When the ground is lost, people will abandon it and the cost of the lost territory will be written off. The people on the remaining dry land will keep sucking the aquifer dry and complain there isn't enough to satisfy their needs.
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I would suggest they recognize the local resources are insufficient for their needs and migrate elsewhere. It's not like "I need it really badly" is going to magically refill an aquifer.
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Your implied 'solution' is that they should stay where they are despite the insufficient resources.
I mean, they can suffer anywhere... If they're that stupid I guess it's best they stay in place and don't spread their genes anywhere else.
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earth's ideal temperature
I'm genuinely curious, oh, "Way Smarter", how you determine the "ideal temperature". Care to post a DOI, thanks.
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The Ideal Temperature is like the Ideal Gas: it's silent, but deadly.
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Your comment brought to mind an old Saturday Night Live Sketch about "The Bean Cafe". Unfortunately the only place I found the video is on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/SNL-O... [facebook.com]
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Hehe.
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I've never seen that! That was great, thanks. RIP Phil Hartman
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Nice try.
Sinking Up (Score:2, Offtopic)
How can something sink up?
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So? Move (Score:1)
Just move a few miles down the road. Problem solved. So many people just want to hear themselves cry.
Stand With North Jakarta (Score:2)
My heart goes out to the people of North Jakarta
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Doing nothing isn't a great choice either. Even building a time machine and telling people 100 years ago not to pump out the aquifers wouldn't work because people would listen anyways.
Sounds like a.... Sustainability problem. (Score:1)
Hank Johnson, call your office (Score:2)
Fear not (Score:2)
Fear not, in other places land is rising due to uplift caused by plate tectonics. Thus has it been for millenia.
Nobody is allowed to be happy (Score:2)
The people on the high ground are going to be upset when environmental refugees start squatting on their land.
complexity is tedious and politically inconvenient (Score:2)
People simply HATE complexity. Complexity also does not lend well to political sloganeering. Complexity, however, is everywhere in the real world.
For many years, people have been politically agitated by "global warming" (later re-named "climate change") and this has been the excuse for everything related to sea levels and human occupation. It's been easy, and politically useful. While it's certainly possible the globe is warming, it's possible humans are THE cause, or a contributing cause, etc. but this ent