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 report online March 28 in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. Soil is compacting beneath Venice, bringing the city down with it. And Venice 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.