Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser . In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.Scientists are saying that this subsidence could be because of groundwater depletion, among other factors.
The situation could see one-quarter of China’s coastal lands slip below sea level within a few decades, posing “serious threats” to the hundreds of millions of people who live on the coast, the paper notes.Subsidence is when land sinks relative to sea level, usually owing to extraction of subsurface water, rock or other resources.
The authors, led by Tao Shengli, a researcher in remote-sensing technology at Peking University in Beijing, assessed 82 cities across China with a population of more than 2 million. They used radar pulses from satellites to measure the changes in the distance between the satellite and the ground to examine how its elevations changed between 2015 and 2022.
“The key to addressing China’s city subsidence could lie in the long-term, sustained control of groundwater extraction,” the paper says. Wei Meng, a geophysicist at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston regards the figures as “terrifying”.