Georgia is Literally Sinking
Don’t be too alarmed, but parts of the U.S. East Coast, including Georgia, are actually sinking into the ocean. This development is chronicled in a new article from Earthobservatory.nasa.gov. The article states that “rising seas driven by melting ice and the thermal expansion of warming water is only part of what threatens coastal areas. The land is also sinking.” And, yes, Georgia is sinking.
The Sinking East Coast
According to a NASA-funded team of scientists at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation (EOI) Lab, this change is happening fast. It’s happening rapidly enough to endanger infrastructure, farmland, and wetlands that literally millions of people along the East Coast use. The study, which was published in PNAS Nexus, discovered that “more than half of infrastructure in major cities such as New York, Baltimore, and Norfolk is built on land that sank, or subsided, by 1 to 2 millimeters per year between 2007 and 2020.” But, Georgia is part of this, too. In addition to those areas, land in some counties in Georgia, Delaware, Maryland and South Carolina actually sank at double or triple that rate. Yikes.
“Subsidence is a pernicious, highly localized, and often overlooked problem in comparison to global sea level rise, but it’s a major factor that explains why water levels are rising in many parts of the eastern U.S.,” said Leonard Ohenhen, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, in the article.
So, what are the real-life consequences of this happening? People living on the East Coast in these areas could experience more tidal flooding. They could also see more damaged homes and issues with saltwater impacting into farmland and fresh water. But, it’s not all doom and gloom. The article states that “subsidence is a problem that we can slow at local scales to some degree,” according to Manoochehr Shirzaei, a co-author on both studies and director of the EOI Lab. For more information and to view a map of the changes, to here.
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