Land across Chesapeake Bay area is sinking. New study shows by how much

Kelly Izlar

5 Feb 2026

Three field members look at a piece of equipment in the middle of a field. Marshy land in backbround. — Virginia Tech field team members (from left) Karen Williams, Madeline Kronebusch, and Jasmine Floyd at a campaign Global Navigation Satellite System site on the Eastern Shore. Photo courtesy of D. Sarah Stamps.

The entire Chesapeake Bay region is sinking. A recent Virginia Tech-led study published in Nature Scientific Reports provided highly precise rates of subsidence, or sinking land, which vary from 0.4 to 3 millimeters per year across the bay area.

“The Chesapeake Bay is a region of financial, historical, and ecological value, and it's worth understanding what we can predict in terms of sea-level changes in the future,” said Karen Williams, a recent geosciences Ph.D. graduate and the study’s first author.

According to the study, major cities in the bay area are seeing varying rates of subsidence: Washington D.C., and Baltimore about 1 millimeter per year; Ocean City, Maryland, about 2.4 millimeters per year; and Hampton, Virginia, about 2.3 millimeters per year.

The sinking itself is not a surprise: The first documented reports of vertical land motion in the Chesapeake Bay came from surveys between 1940 and 1971. But a team of geophysicists wanted more precise rates to better understand why it's sinking and how it affects coastal hazards.

Virginia Tech’s D. Sarah Stamps worked with 10 institutions to collect data from more than 100 continuous satellite system stations at more than 60 temporary sites across the Chesapeake Bay region every year for five years.

The team made use of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems, which is the broad term for satellite systems that orbit the Earth and can measure surface movements to within 1 millimeter.

The satellite systems are a huge asset in establishing rates of relative sea level rise, which considers not only the global influx of water from melting glaciers but also local factors, such as sinking or uplifting land.

“Sea level isn’t just about the ocean rising,” said Stamps, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences. “It’s also about what the land is doing. If the ground is sinking while the water is rising, the effect adds up.”

To see how land motion has changed in the Chesapeake Bay over time, Stamps and Williams compared data collected over the past five years to similar measurements from 1974.

“We found a little bit of a range, including some areas that showed subsidence rates have increased and some areas where subsidence rates have decreased since the 1970s,” Williams said. “But all in all, after creating the final interpolated solution, we find that the regional signal of subsidence was up to 3 millimeters per year.”

As to why this is happening, the team is looking into two main drivers: localized groundwater withdrawal as well as long-term tectonic movements — specifically the retreat of ancient glaciers, which can cause the Earth’s surface to buckle up and down.

How much each factor contributes to the current subsidence is an ongoing question, subject for future work, which will build on the precise data presented in this study.

Original study DOI 10.1038/s41598-025-32348-5