New York City is sinking: 28 cities with 34 million people under big threat
New York City is sinking! Yes, you read that right.An analysis of 28 American cities has revealed that all 28 of them are sinking every year and the reason is over extraction of groundwater from the surface.The urban areas are sinking by 2 to 10 millimetres per year, according to new research from Virginia Tech that used the latest satellite imagery to assess the major changes unfolding under the feet.advertisement
Satellite-based radar measurements were used to create high-resolution maps of subsidence, or sinking land, for 28 of the most populous US cities. "Even slight downward shifts in land can significantly compromise the structural integrity of buildings, roads, bridges, and railways over time," Leonard Ohenhen, a former Virginia Tech graduate student and the study's lead author said.
Twenty-eight major U.S. cities, including New York, Dallas, and Seattle, are seeing urban areas sink. (Photo: Getty)
In every city studied, at least 20 per cent of the urban area is sinking — and in 25 of 28 cities, at least 65 per cent is sinking.advertisementThe study, published in the journal Nature Cities, analysed changes happening in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, and five other cities that are sinking at about 2 millimetres per year."The latent nature of this risk means that infrastructure can be silently compromised over time with damage only becoming evident when it is severe or potentially catastrophic. This risk is often exacerbated in rapidly expanding urban centers," Associate Professor Manoochehr Shirzaei at Virginia Tech's Earth Observation and Innovation Lab said.The study revealed that the sinking was primarily due to the compounding effect of shifts in weather patterns with urban population and socioeconomic growth."It is potentially accelerating subsidence rates and transforming previously stable urban areas into vulnerable zones for flooding, infrastructure failure, and long-term land degradation," Shirzai added.Several cities in Texas exhibited some of the highest measured rates of subsidence at about 5 millimetres per year — and as much as 10 millimetres per year in certain areas of Houston.Must Watch
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Mint
2 hours ago
- Mint
Two films show our present is the future we once feared
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And on others, she is training it to recognise a football foul or differentiate between turmeric and ginger. It's slow, repetitive work, but essential. For all its promise, artificial intelligence can't build itself. Instead, it is realised through countless hours of 'ghost work", a term coined by American anthropologist Mary L. Gray to address the kind of underpaid back-end labour that propels the artificial intelligence revolution. Yet as Nehma delves deeper into the job, she begins to see the limiting worth of her own intelligence. Her American clients don't define her labour as knowledge—even though the job routinely necessitates her judgement and insight. When she refuses to label a caterpillar as a pest, arguing that it only feeds on rotting parts of the plant thus protecting it, her manager receives a complaint about poor data quality. 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Like Humans in the Loop, the action in Taak, which also showed last year at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, is located in the workplace. The 39-minute short revolves around Shalini (a magnetic Jyoti Dogra) and Komal (Ambika Kamal), two former wrestlers now working as bouncers at a testosterone-soaked Delhi nightclub. After a serious security breach one night, the club's management responds with a new rule: all staff members must now wear smartwatches, supposedly for safety—but clearly for control. Held accountable for her team's lapse, Shalini—the older of the two women—is pressured to ensure that no one resists the new rule. She complies immediately, believing the management's pitch that the watches are there to boost efficiency with location-tracking and attendance-clocking. But Komal, younger and more wary, sees it for what it really is: constant surveillance. She's hiding from a violent past and her safety depends on staying unseen. 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4 hours ago
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The Hindu
11 hours ago
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How maths helped identify fake paintings and other matters
The American Martin Gardner inspired generations of professionals as well as students like me, who saw that the subject was fun and enjoyed his books on mathematical puzzles. 'Fun' is not an aspect emphasised in our schools; the result is generations who might have enjoyed the subject being turned away for life. I love the popular maths books of George Gamow, and in later years, Ian Stewart, Simon Singh, Paul Hoffman, John Allen Paulos, and the wonderful Marcus du Sautoy, the Oxford professor for the Public Understanding of Science (it is likely that if an Indian university created such a post, its holder would quickly find himself in jail). Du Sautoy has written about the limits to science (What We Cannot Know), the art of the shortcut (Thinking Better), prime numbers (The Music of the Primes), the maths behind games (Around the World in 80 Games), books that I reread often. 'My big thesis,' du Sautoy once said, 'is that although the world looks messy and chaotic, if you translate it into the world of numbers and shapes, patterns emerge and you start to understand why things are the way they are.' Eight decades ago, G.H. Hardy wrote in his classic A Mathematician's Apology, ' A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.' Du Sautoy credits Hardy with stirring his interest in maths in his recent book, Blue Prints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity. He paints a large canvas, with scientists, architects, musicians, artists, choreographers, writers all of whom use mathematics – consciously or otherwise – in their work. Blueprints are the fundamental mathematical structures that underpin human creativity, he says, and goes on to discuss nine such blueprints from primes to randomness. Leonardo da Vinci, Jackson Pollock, Borges, Escher, Bowie are only a few of the non-mathematicians who appear as we discover patterns in unexpected places. Hardy wrote, 'the mathematician's patterns must be beautiful…beauty is the first test, there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.' You can see that here. Du Sautoy tells us that Macbeth has a numerical structure based on prime numbers and that the number of words in key scenes is a prime number. This rhythm contributes to the unsettling atmosphere of the play. Mozart's The Magic Flute, says du Sautoy, is 'dripping with maths'. The abstract works of Jackson Pollock which gave the impression of paint thrown recklessly onto a canvas had a deliberate structure too. Pollock always insisted he there was no accident in his work. He painted fractals, geometric patterns that repeat arbitrarily. Interestingly, when some canvases supposedly by Pollock were discovered after his death, they were shown to be fakes because they were not fractals. As students, we are told of the separation between the arts and the sciences; we often carry that idea into adult life. Mathematics, says Marcus du Sautoy, is the bridge that connects this cultural divide.
