Lowering of land elevation is a major hazard in flat coastal areas and in inner sedimentary plains. In many deltaic areas, land subsidence is now outpacing absolute sea level rise. Urban areas such as Mexico City, Venice, Bangkok, Jakarta, Shanghai, Los Angeles and New Orleans all experience large rates of subsidence and have to deal with the resulting increased flood risk (from the sea, rivers, or strong precipitation events), and damage to infrastructure and buildings. In rural areas with an organic-rich subsoil land subsidence causes flooding and loss of soil fertility.
Surface movement is caused by natural processes such as tectonics and consolidation of shallow deposits, and by anthropogenic activities like fluid pumping from the subsurface and drainage of reclaimed areas. Often, natural and human-induced land subsidence occur coeval, blurring the cumulative subsidence measurement. One of the challenges ahead is to disentangle the different processes and to assess their relative contributions. Understanding land subsidence requires contributions from the geotechnical, geological/geophysical and hydrological communities.
This session welcomes contributions on the processes of land subsidence, the measurement techniques, and the impact of land subsidence on the natural or anthropogenic system. We specifically invite contributions exploring the integration of advanced measurement techniques with state of the art models.
The aim is to exchange and discuss new methodologies and applications in this hot-topic field of science. The focus is on the quantification of the earth surface movements, the determination of the driving parameters using these measurements, and the possibilities to provide reliable predictions and risk assessments.