The topics in the news headlines every day present more depressing pictures about the future of humanity. In this period when we are struggling with the global epidemic and climate change is becoming more and more dangerous, another bad news came from the city of San Francisco, USA. Tom Parsons, a researcher at the US Geological Survey, announced that the city of San Francisco was beginning to ‘collapse’.
Speaking to the broadcast channel NBC Bay Area, Parsons states that he examined all the buildings in the Bay Area one by one with the data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 satellite. The results show that the buildings in the city center, where the settlement is dense, collapse towards the bottom due to their weight. It was also found that some of these buildings were tilted to the side.
There are skyscrapers that sink 50 cm:
Millennium Tower, known as the ‘San Francisco’s raking building’, is the third heaviest building in the city with a weight of 311 million kilograms. The 60-storey skyscraper, which was opened in 2009, has sunk about 50 cm and tilted 30 cm since then. Experts state that many buildings, such as the Millennium Tower, have collapsed since they were built.
Stating that they are worried that the weight of these gigantic structures in the city center will trigger a fault line, experts also fear the consequences of climate change. Parsons is of the opinion that rising water levels and flooding from possible storms will pose a threat to the city when it is so close to the shore. Parsons announced that he would apply this research in New York’s Manhattan region as well.