If you've ever been to Beijing and gotten that sinking feeling (no, not the one that those get when being disappeared), then you're not alone because the city is literally sinking. According to a new study, Beijing is sinking 11cm (4 inches) a year because the city is using too much ground water.
Some areas of Beijing are sinking by as much as four inches a year due to the over-pumping of groundwater from beneath China's capital the International Business Times reports.
As the International Business Times explains
Some areas of Beijing are sinking by as much as four inches (11 cm) each year, due to the over-pumping of groundwater from beneath China's capital, a survey has revealed. Beijing has a population of over 20 million and is the fifth most water-stressed city in the world, meaning the resulting subsidence is set to worsen.
Groundwater has sat beneath the city for thousands of years, but it is increasingly being used for domestic consumption, industrial use and agriculture. It has been estimated by state media outlet Sina that Beijing alone requires 3.5 billion litres of water each year, two-thirds of which is pumped from beneath the city. As it is removed, the soil compacts, causing subsidence above. The process is accelerated by the increasing weight bearing down as buildings continue to be constructed.
The data was compiled using GPS measurements and satellite imagery, and found that some central zones were most at risk. These included the eastern suburb of Chaoyang, where subsidence was 11 cm a year. Chaoyang is also one of the areas where development has been most marked and the report claims there may be risks to inhabitants due to the uneven nature of the subsidence.
According to the study, published by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the sinking of land could have an impact on the country's transport infrastructure. In an email to The Guardian they wrote: "We are currently carrying out a detailed analysis of the impacts of subsidence on critical infrastructure (eg high-speed railways) in the Beijing plain. Hopefully a paper summarizing our findings will come out later this year."
As the population grows, the pace at which the city sinks accelerates.
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However, the pace at which it is sinking has accelerated as its population has increased. Beijing's population in 1935 was 5.6 million; it rose to 10.8 million by 1990.
In recent years, there has been even greater urban growth. In early 2016, the city's population reached an estimated 21.7 million, up from 19.6 million in 2010, and 13.6 million in 2000.
The distribution of the sinking depends on fault lines in the ground beneath the city, and is worse in the east, north-east and northern parts of Beijing, where bowls of sinking ground have increased in size and gradually merged.
It's not just Beijing either, according to the study 45 other cities across China are also sinking, including Shanghai.
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The silver lining to this bizarre occurrence is the fact that now China has another GDP boosting project to undertake. In addition to constructing more ghost towns and high speed rail projects, Beijing can now begin work on a $64 billion project to reduce its reliance on the groundwater by building a 2,400km network of tunnels and canals to eventually channel 44.8 billion cubic meters of fresh water annually from the Yangtze River in Southern China.
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