Mexico City officials actually recognized the subsidence problem in the late 1800s, when they saw buildings sinking and began taking measurements. “It's losing water and it's losing volume,” says Solano‐Rojas. As the mask dries, you can feel it tightening against your skin. Or think of it like applying a clay face mask. With less space between the particles, the sediment compacts.
But remove the water-as Mexico City’s planners did when they drained the lake in the first place, and as the city has done since then by tapping the ground as an aquifer-and those particles rearrange themselves to stack neatly, like plates put away in a cupboard. Think about throwing plates into a sink, willy-nilly-their random orientations allow lots of liquid to flow between them. When the lake sediment under Mexico City was still wet, its component particles of clay were arranged in a disorganized manner. Bit by bit, the metropolis that became modern-day Mexico City sprawled, until the lake was no more.Īnd that set in motion the physical changes that began the sinking of the city. When the Spanish arrived, destroyed Tenochtitlan, and massacred its people, they began draining the lake and building on top of it. The Aztec people built their capital of Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, which is nestled in a basin surrounded by mountains. The foundation of the problem is Mexico City’s bad foundation.
That twisting and tilting Solano‐Rojas noticed was just the start of a slow-motion crisis for 9.2 million people in the fastest-sinking city on Earth. Spots just outside Mexico City proper could sink 100 feet. In the next century and a half, they calculate, areas could drop by as much as 65 feet. According to new modeling by the two researchers and their colleagues, parts of the city are sinking as much as 20 inches a year. It’s the result of a geological phenomenon called subsidence, which usually happens when too much water is drawn from underground, and the land above begins to compact.
Picking up the study of geology at the university, Solano‐Rojas met geophysicist Enrique Cabral-Cano, who was actually researching the surprising reason for that infrastructural chaos: The city was sinking-big time. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, the city is so much different than my hometown.’”ĭifferent, it turned out, in a bad way. “At that time, I didn't know what it was about. “What surprised me was that everything was kind of twisted and tilted,” says Solano‐Rojas. Not the grid itself, mind you, but the way that the built environment seemed to be in tumult, like a surrealist painting. When Darío Solano‐Rojas moved from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the layout of the metropolis confused him.
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