“It was thought that the sinking had ... stabilized, but now
we know it will continue into the future indefinitely.” — YEHUDA BOCK
Venice hasn’t
stopped sinking

By Devin Powell

Venice is still sinking and will probably continue to do so for a long time, a new study suggests. That’s bad news for the local government, which had already put a stop to groundwater pumping in an effort to curb the city’s subsidence.

“It was thought that the sinking had pretty much been stabilized, but now we know it will continue into the future indefinitely,” says Yehuda Bock, a geodesist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

Today’s sinking has little to do with human activities, Bock and colleagues

Vene

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report online March 28 in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. Soil is compacting beneath Venice, bringing the city down. It rides atop a slab of Earth’s crust that is slowly diving beneath the Apennine Mountains, giving the city a tilt noticed for the first time in the new study.

Data collected by GPS devices and satellite radar systems showed the city dropping an average of 1 to 2 millimeters per year from 2000 to 2010.

Cava

Velocity [mm/year]

Data from satellite radar systems and GPS devices reveal that Venice ( section shown) sank at an average rate of 1 to 2 millimeters per year from 2000 to 2010, with some areas (red) subsiding even faster.

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That’s slower than it sank decades ago, says Bock, and slower than other cities such as New Orleans are sinking today. So some researchers don’t think this natural subsidence is worth worrying about.

“We think this is a very small number,” says Tazio Strozzi, a physicist with the remote-sensing company GAMMA in Gümligen, Switzerland. Previous satellite measurements have detected a similar amount of subsidence, he says.

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