Mexico City is sinking at such an alarming charge that it’s visible from the space. Imagery from a robust NASA radar system is revealing subsidence charges of greater than 0.5 inches a month — making the metropolis one of the planet’s fasting-sinking capitals.
The sprawling metropolis, additionally one of the world’s biggest cities, stretches out throughout a high-altitude lake and sits atop an historic aquifer, which offers round 60% of consuming water for the metropolis’s 22 million residents.
Over the years, this aquifer has been so over-pumped that it’s triggered the land above it to subside. Over-extraction has additionally contributed to a power water disaster that has left the Mexico City facing a potential day zero, the place faucets run dry.
The metropolis’s fast sinking has been exacerbated by relentless city improvement, with new infrastructure including additional weight on prime of the clay-rich soil.
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Mexico City’s subsidence was first documented in the Twenties, and in the years since, residents have skilled the impacts, with fractured roads, tilted buildings and harm to the prepare system.
New imagery from the NISAR satellite tv for pc, a undertaking between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization, reveals the extent of the drawback in startling element.
NISAR was designed to map some of the planet’s most advanced processes and is in a position to monitor delicate motions resembling land sinking. It’s one of the strongest radar techniques ever launched into space, according to NASA.
Between October 2025 and January 2026, throughout Mexico City’s dry season, NISAR mapped the motion of the floor beneath the metropolis. Its findings reveal that elements of the metropolis are sinking at a charge of round 0.8 inches a month — that’s greater than 9.5 inches yearly.
Areas most affected embody the Benito Juarez International Airport, the metropolis’s major airport.
One metropolis landmark reveals the impacts of sinking. The 114-foot excessive Angel of Independence monument, inbuilt 1910 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of Mexico’s independence, has wanted 14 steps added to its base as the floor beneath it sinks.
“Mexico City is a well-known hot spot when it comes to subsidence, and images like this are just the beginning for NISAR,” mentioned David Bekaert, a undertaking supervisor at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research and a member of the NISAR science workforce. “We’re going to see an influx of new discoveries from all over the world.”
The satellite tv for pc is additionally in a position to monitor different planetary processes resembling glaciers sliding or crops rising, in addition to pure disasters resembling volcanic eruptions.