VENICE THE SINKING CITY INSTALL

These barriers were designed to protect the city from tides that are coming in higher as overall sea levels are rising in response to climate change.

VENICE THE SINKING CITY INSTALL

The compaction of the sediments beneath Venice also remains a factor.įloods are happening more frequently along Venice's canals now, Bock said, with residents having to walk on wooden planks to stay above the floodwaters in large parts of the city about four or five times a year.Ī multibillion-dollar effort to install flood-protection walls that can be raised to block incoming tides is nearing completion, he said. The Adriatic plate, on which Venice sits, is subducting beneath the Apennines Mountains and causing the city and its environs to drop slightly in elevation. The forces causing the subsidence now are likely natural ones that have been impacting the area for a long time, particularly plate tectonics. That means the western part - where the city of Venice is - is higher than the eastern sections.

The team also found that the area was tilting a bit, about a millimeter or two eastward per year, something never noticed before.

'Our combined GPS and InSAR analysis clearly captured the movements over the last decade that neither GPS nor InSAR could sense alone,' said study team member Shimon Wdowinski, associate research professor of marine geology and geophysics at the University of Miami. The patches of land in Venice's lagoon (117 islands in all) are also sinking, with northern sections of the lagoon dropping at a rate of 2 to 3 mm (0.08 to 0.12 inches) per year, and the southern lagoon subsiding at 3 to 4 mm (0.12 to 0.16 inches) per year. The team use data from 2000 to 2010 to track changes in the elevation of Venice and its surrounding lagoons and found that the city of Venice was subsiding on average about 1 to 2 millimeters a year (0.04 to 0.08 inches per year).

Venice the sinking city