New York City is SINKING: Scientists say real estate poses a bigger threat to the city than climate change

New York is sinking fast, and new research shows that the “bigger is better” ethos of real estate developers is to blame.

A team from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Rhode Island found that the weight of the city’s giant skyscrapers causes the five boroughs to sink one to two millimeters annually.

The team analyzed the weight of 1,084,954 buildings built in a 302-square-mile city, including more than 6,000 skyrises — 247 of which were skyscrapers over 150 feet (45 m) tall.

As these behemoths push the ground beneath them ever closer to sea level, climate change is raising the ocean to accommodate them.

While a few millimeters may not sound catastrophic, some parts of the city are sinking much faster, keeping pace with the fastest speeds known to move Earth’s tectonic plates.

“It can be exacerbated by storms,” ​​geologist and co-author Tom Parsons of the US Geological Survey told Dailymail.com.

“Of course we’ve had some events in New York City with hurricanes coming.”

A sinking city and rising ocean tides, Parsons said, will put New York at greater risk of being inundated with floodwaters the next time a hurricane like Sandy or Ida hits the Atlantic coast.

“That’s where a lot of the flood risk comes from,” Parsons said.

Not necessarily that the island will be completely submerged — at least not anytime soon.

“But when you have these extreme events, you can start to see flooding.”

Parsons and his colleagues said they likely underestimated the seriousness of the situation, since their research did not take into account the burden of other heavy elements such as asphalt roads, concrete sidewalks, railroads or the rest of New York City’s infrastructure.

Last year, some co-authors from the University of Rhode Island placed the Big Apple alongside 98 other coastal cities around the world that are also sinking under the weight of their majestic skylines.

In most of the cities they surveyed, the land below is receding faster than sea levels are rising due to climate change — the dangerous combination that threatens residents with greater flood risks faster than current climate models predict.

For this new study, the scientists first calculated the total mass of New York’s more than one million buildings: 764,000,000,000 kilograms, or 1.68 trillion pounds.

Points marked in blue indicate where researchers found the most severe sinking, as observed by satellite. Each point represents a fall of more than −2.75 mm/year

In this image, the same blue spots are compared to modeled estimates of the pressure caused by heavy construction loads

By examining all that weight, distributed over a grid of 100-by-100-meter squares, the team was able to convert the building mass into a clear measure of the downward force pressing on the bedrock beneath the city.

They then compared this work to satellite imagery that can measure changes in land surface elevation, and mapped those measurements over their city-wide estimates to test their model against real-world data.

Another absent factor, they said, that could exacerbate the problem even more quickly is groundwater tapping and pumping, which could essentially help the pressure coming from the buildings to further compact the dirt and rocks below.

‘The tip of the paper’ writes Parsons of USGS and his colleagues at the University of Rhode Island“is to raise awareness that any additional tall building built on the coast, river or lake can add to future flood risk.”