Sinking land, rising risk in New York City
New York City's transportation infrastructure faces a growing risk from sinking land.
Slow but persistent sinking land could pose serious long-term risks to New York City's critical transportation infrastructure, including major airports, subway lines, and highways.
While current rates of subsidence, or sinking land, across much of the city appear modest, a recent Virginia Tech study in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation shows that cumulative and uneven ground motion can significantly increase the probability of infrastructure damage over time.
Using nearly a decade of satellite radar observations, the team developed a probabilistic framework that translates shifting ground into engineering-relevant damage metrics to look at what could happen in the next 30 to 50 years.
“This is the kind of information infrastructure managers actually need to plan ahead,” said Ntambila Daud, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Virginia Tech and Ardhi University.
Under continued deformation, the researchers estimate economic consequences could exceed $18 billion, affecting approximately 3.8 miles of subway lines and 4.8 miles of highway. Major transportation hubs, including LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International Airports, emerge as high-risk hotspots because of their construction on compressible soils and historical fill.
“Transportation systems are designed to tolerate small movements, but not persistent differential motion,” said Oluwaseyi Dasho, co-author and researcher in Virginia Tech’s geosciences department.
While the analysis focuses on New York City, the framework is scalable and transferable to other cities because it relies on widely available satellite data rather than city-specific assumptions.
“This study highlights a hidden vulnerability of modern cities: long-term ground deformation that unfolds too slowly to trigger alarms, yet steadily undermines infrastructure resilience,” said Manoochehr Shirzaei, senior author and associate professor in geosciences at Virginia Tech.
Results show that even slow subsidence, if left unaddressed, can quietly accumulate into serious operational and safety challenges — especially for airports and major transportation corridors.
