Parts of the New York City metropolitan area are sinking and rising at different rates due to factors ranging from land-use practices to long-lost glaciers, scientists have found. While the elevation changes seem small – fractions of inches per year – they can enhance or diminish local flood risk linked to sea level rise.
The new study was published Wednesday in Science Advances by a team of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Rutgers University in New Jersey. The team analyzed upward and downward vertical land motion – also known as uplift and subsidence – across the metropolitan area from 2016 to 2023 using a remote sensing technique called interferometric synthetic…