Grand Canal, Venice | © Greg Gross
Venice isn’t the only city in the world that’s going down fast. If you want to see some of these man-made wonders, you might want to move up that “someday” timetable of yours a bit. You may not have as long as you think.
The folks over at Yahoo! Travel are recirculating a U.S. News & World Report list of the seven cities in the world that are sinking fast.
And though nearly all of them qualify as “usual suspects,” the list still manages to produce a few surprises.
For one thing, while Venice, built on thousands of pilings sunk into a tidal marsh on the Adriatic Sea, is not Number One. That grim distinction goes to Mexico City, built on the soggy bed of what had been a volcanic lake.
Indeed, before Hernan Cortez arrived from Spain and turned the whole country out, it was a lake, and the area’s residents lived on a collection of man-made floating islands.
There are multiple projects underway to delay the inevitable, but engineers agree that it can’t be stopped.
Perhaps the biggest surprise may be the Number Six city on the list: New York City. That’s right, boys and girls, according to the science types, not only may the Big Apple one day be bobbing, but the combination of global warming, erosion and saltwater intrusion means the place may one day not only be submerged, but end up swept out to sea.
Yikes!
Another surprise is a city whose sinking woes may not have sunk in fully on this side of the Pacific: the Chinese port city of Shanghai, a major center of commerce and cultural connection between East and West. Like Venice, it was built on swampy ground. It’s Number Four on the list, and experts say there’s not much more that engineering can do to save it.
Shanghai is noteworthy to me because it’s the only city on the list of the sinking seven on which I haven’t already set foot.
I do seem to have an affinity for cities bent on turning themselves into submarines. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, since I hail from one of them: New Orleans.
And yes, it’s on the list, too.