‘The increasing sea levels are not only frightening the United States East Coast but are also vanishing some of the major cities of the country like New York and Baltimore’, as per NASA images.
A NASA-funded team of scientists, working at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab found that the geographical problem is “occurring quickly to threaten infrastructure, farmland, and wetlands that tens of millions of people along the coast depend upon”.
To understand the motion of the coast, the scientists studied satellite data and discovered that infrastructure in major cities like Norfolk, Baltimore, New York and Virginia, is built on land which has greatly below the ground level between 2007 and 2020.
The land sank by an average of 1 to 2 millimetres every year. Some counties in Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia also observed the sinking of the land at twice or thrice the speed.
According to the scientists, ‘The land in marshes sank by more than 3 millimetres every year’. The forests have also suffered displacement because of the invasion of saltwater and the subsiding land.
However, wildlife is not the only thing which has been affected. Nearly 897,000 structures, which include highways and airports, are present on the land which is subsiding.
The findings, which followed another study by the Virginia Tech lab, were published in PNAS Nexus.
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