And what they call a village in China is what we call a mid size city in US. No joke, went to “villages” with 300,000 people. Yeah, they called that a village
@@JasperKlijndijk The rate of growth is stagnant but its no way near that you may regard as quickly falling down. Its negative 0.03%. How is that a quick decline? Its not even a single whole percent worth. Statistically It may not even leave the error margin.
It is often overlooked that urbanization covers the land with impermeable roofs and streets. So the rain water is prevented from percolating into the earth. This creates paradoxical floods even in cities that are in drought conditions. Any little rain that falls overwhelms the drainage, because it is no longer absorbed into the ground.
There is NO drainage infrastructure! The crooked contractors only put the drainage grills even with the road surface!!!! The ccp officials are so used to getting bribes they don't want to do anything that makes them actually do work...😂😂😂😂
I think the craziest place this is happening is in Mexico City, where the rate of subsidence is massive and the whole city is built over one of the worst chosen locations for a megacity, a lake.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn so far only the governing/administration body of Indonesia moving the other parts of Jarkata: the education institutions, the industry, the people,... might take even longer and undergo more difficulties
Yea but it was once a brilliant place for a city back when the Aztecs used it properly. The entire point was the water was used to move things through the city. Then the Spanish came and you know the rest. However we can never forget just how brilliant the city design once was
The Aztecs had a prophecy of some sorts that they will have a prosperous capital city on a land where the eagle sits on a cactus eating a snake. They saw it happen at current day Mexico City and it turned out well for them. Then the Spanish came, over population happened and their meticulous city plan was thrown out of the window, burying the lake. But what’s cool about this story is that it was that Aztec prophecy that still is a part of their national flag. 🇲🇽
There is a similar issue in industrialized West Germany in the Ruhr area, from which black coal had been extracted for a very long time, and in some places it is still ongoing. As a side effect the entire area had to manage just this sinking of the land by a sophisticated water infrastructure, and there are areas in which houses face damages because of the sinking ground. But this makes no headlines, and beyond the local area, in Germany, this remains rather unknown, and I came to know it only when I moved there for some time for a job. This problem is, like in China, 100 years old, and locals are just used to it. With the explanations from this video, I would assume the same problem exists pretty everywhere where heavy industry and/or water supply overused the land beyond repair.
Germany has also that Problem. But not because the extraction of water but of coal. Some cities in North Rhine Westphalia would be meters deep on the bottom of lakes without pumps running for 24/7 for the next eternity.
1:12 San Joaquin Valley, California (in this photo) used to be largely covered by a massive lake (largest west of the Mississippi) and surrounding marshlands, but after we diverted the water to LA and other cities, it became a dry, parched environment. That’s why the ground sank so much. Ironically, after the unusually large rains last year, the farmland where the lake used to be flooded and we got Tulare Lake back for a time.
No, humans just don't drink that much water. A human drinks what, ~2.5L a day? Meanwhile, a kg of soy needs 2500L to grow. In other words, if you eat 100g of soy beans, that's the equivalent of what you drink in 100 days.
Subsidence can also cause local apparent sea-level trends to greatly differ from the widely advertised (but actually very slow) global rate. However, subsidence isn't always caused by groundwater pumping. Oil and gas extraction can also cause subsidence. More importantly, natural processes, like post-glacial rebound, can cause uplift in some places and subsidence in others. Ironically, Greta's Thunberg's hometown of Stockholm is one such place. Uplift there is about triple the global sea-level rise rate, so the local "relative" sea-level trend at Stockholm Harbour is downward, rather than upward. (It is a minor contributor to their periodic dredging expenses.)
In the suburban area that I live in Colorado, subsidence is connected with the area's past underground coal mining industry. There are fields on which they won't even build roads even though they would help traffic patterns. There are awkward breaks in the pattern of sub division housing for parks and openspace that don't fit in with the aesthetics of urban planning. Some significant parts of a major mall were torn down a few years after construction as the buildings were condemned.
@@PaulSpades Having grown up in a city with a grid - Minneapolis - I conclude you don't know what you are talking about. More lanes don't help traffic, but a better pattern can help.
What India needs to do most, along with the rest of Asia, is shift away from rice. It's just too water intensive of a crop. And yet the govt. in India, as elsewhere, actually offers subsidies for rice production instead, which is ridiculous.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn billions of people eat rice; telling them to shift away from rice is as easy as telling billions of meat-eating people to give up eating meat in general secondly, what would be the alternative crop to rice ? it is water-intensive, but it also has high calories yield. what other crop can grow all over Asia and feed as much people as rice ?
@@jayaramnarayanan8752 As I see around my home, All new buildings do seem to have this facility. Ours is from the old era but we are getting it done anyhow.
Great research. 👏🏼 One question: How huge the sink has to be to be considered a result of excessive groundwater drain? We are seeing a lot of these in India lately. Most of the groundwater is used for farming. The government tried making some laws that would make people use lesser groundwater but it was protested against and now we're seeing a few sinkholes. I think the reason is the same as you explained.
What India needs to do most, along with the rest of Asia, is shift away from rice. It's just too water intensive of a crop. And yet the govt. in India, as elsewhere, actually offers subsidies for rice production instead, which is ridiculous. Of course people will protest at their groundwater use being restricted, so rather just make it so they don't need as much of it as rice demands.
Shipping water across vast distances via canals reminds me of a proposed project where Nevada wanted British Columbia to flood most of the Rocky Mountain trench and pipe the water down to the Vegas area. It was of course rejected, not least of all because it would result in a massive waste of water through evaporation, in much the same way that long-distance electricity transmission results in increased bleed-off of energy. These huge mega-projects remind me of a book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy on the Soviet attempts to "conquer" the Arctic through sheer force of will. There will be costs to this kind of hubris. The lost Aral Sea is a testament to the unintended consequences of playing around with water on this scale.
2:08 the sinking caused by buildings are local, only in the close area to the building. For example, a 100 stories building weighs more or less 50 t/m2 and this is equivalent to remove approx 20m of soil for the basement to build the underground garages and to compensate the building weight. A tall building with underground garajes may compensate the majority of its weight.
You mentioned synthetic aperture radar. I got a great lecture on this from the great Dr John McDonald, of Donald Detwiler and Associates the satellite technology company. His displays and slideshow showed the results of what mountain ranges look like infrastructure and could even identify the differences in crops from the chaff left behind it, including between legumes and peas. If I was standing on those crops I don't think I'd know the difference honestly. One of the examples he showed of lands in uplift was over volcanic regions where underground magma Chambers were filling or emptying. Amazing accuracy to within an inch
hah, I knew it, living in an old mining area there are citys that are like 10m below their old height because of all the water pumped out to keep the mines dry
and then there's the rest of the world, with even less centralized governments, building and maintaining private and public supply and drainage systems that just work.
MODFLOW…hmmmm, that gives me pause. Our Host’s “Accuracies vary” refers to the various models to calculate subsidence, and in the case of MODFLOW, that description is an understatement. Keep in mind, good modeling requires good data. Otherwise a result might be garbage in, garbage out. MODFLOW is a finite difference model, not based on the more robust finite element approach. There are various “packages” to expand its capabilities, of which subsidence (SUB) is one. The packages are add-ons, versus inherently integrated calculations. These factors result in limitations to applying the model/packages to some real world situations or generate instability and variable results. While I have not used SUB, I’ve used MODFLOW and a number of the other packages. The use of packages is often problematic. Why is MODFLOW so widely used? Because of momentum and the difficulty in writing a quality finite element model to replace it, which is long overdue in my opinion.
It's hard to make a good model without siginifact investment on survey. At least, here in Indonesia, in terms of cost it's often way cheaper (and reliable) to rely on local wisdom and pure luck. Wish we have something that can map underground veins in 3D cheaper than the cost of digging the ground.
@@bmanpura Aren't there ground-penetrating RADAR and SONAR devices that can map the underground? I remember huge trucks with vibrating plates below them driving around in my neighbourhood because they were looking for oil, but they haven't been back in years...
That's a different story and the causes are not man made. The city is built on stilts in the middle of the sea pretty much. Now the sea bed is sinking 1.5mm a year, which is a problem. Add to that the rising sea level due to global warming and you get a disaster in the making. But yeah, it doesn't have anything to do with this topic, as it's not due to ground water or oil extraction
You apparently took the whole City Prefecture population for Shijiazhuang. It is in fact 5.090.440 - two times smaller than the District population, still big enough. You can use CityPopulation and other sources to estimate actual built-up population. We have a similar problem in ex USSR particularly in three places - Moldova (there the sinkholes are called Hırtop), Perm land and Donbass region. In Perm land the issue is very unique - salt mining. During USSR, a water grid was indeed constructed at full, but only for European part of the country, and some places of this grid are already being abandoned due to artificial borders. For example, water issues between UZ and TM led to Aral Sea disaster, and in Belarus, the Bug-Desna channel is almost abandoned. In Ukraine, the Dnepr-Donbass channel between Orel' and Seversky Donetz is/was almost at full capacity and needs to be heavily refurbished as this state never bothered to maintain its Soviet infrastructure legacy. In Russia the state of Unified Deep-water Transit System is much better, and the whole european part of the country is linked together. You even can transfer submarines from one sea to another. However, the channel which previously existed in Sverdlovsk region between Kama and Ob' basins is almost abandoned and does not allow for quick transfers of large amounts of water or of vessels from water-plentiful and almost unused Ob' basin to the European part. Same abandoned channel exists between Ob' and Yenisey water basins. If they would be repaired and refurbished, almost 70% of the area of the country would allow for quick fleet and water transfers. China, on the other hand, tries to connect even to the small 'butt-end' of İrtış which starts actually in China before going into what was Soviet territory. It might lead to the decrease of the share of İrtış in the Ob' river basin as a whole.
This video was excellent! Thank you! I've heard of land subsidence issues in some heavily urbanized areas before. I think it might be worthwhile for modern society to look into ways of decentralizing a bit to combat overcrowding, sea level rise, land subsidence, and such. But, that's just my two cents, and it might cause more issues than it solves. I'm not a civil engineer or urban planner, so I'm just speculating. God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
Three key points that were unmentioned; The quality of China's freshwater is abysmal. Very little of it is fit for human consumption, and a large fraction isn't even safe for agricultural use as it's too contaminated with factory runoff. That puts more pressure on ground water, as fewer surface sources are safe to use. Secondly, is just how inefficient and water intensive Chinese agriculture is. They have low mechanization, and still use gravity surface irrigation. Not to mention how water intensive rice is as a crop in general. Third, The Water transfer project is highly unlikely to actually be able to move as much water as they want, primarily due to evaporation. They built as wide, shallow, relatively slow flowing canal, so a large proportion of the water they direct into it wont actually reach the north. It's a huge expense for a band-aid at best.
I know I saw that India was doing double duty on major water canal projects to add solar over them to reduce evaporation. I didn’t notice a single pic here showing similar. I hope they consider it.
It is happening everywhere around the world. UK: 1. London: - Subsidence rate: up to 1 mm/year (0.04 in/year) (source: British Geological Survey) - Affected areas: Central London, Lambeth, and Westminster 2. Manchester: - Subsidence rate: up to 2 mm/year (0.08 in/year) (source: British Geological Survey) - Affected areas: City center and surrounding areas 3. Birmingham: - Subsidence rate: up to 1.5 mm/year (0.06 in/year) (source: British Geological Survey) - Affected areas: City center and nearby neighborhoods EU: 1. Amsterdam, Netherlands: - Subsidence rate: up to 2 mm/year (0.08 in/year) (source: Deltares) - Affected areas: City center and surrounding areas 2. Rotterdam, Netherlands: - Subsidence rate: up to 1.5 mm/year (0.06 in/year) (source: Deltares) - Affected areas: City center and nearby neighborhoods 3. Brussels, Belgium: - Subsidence rate: up to 1 mm/year (0.04 in/year) (source: Royal Observatory of Belgium) - Affected areas: City center and surrounding areas 4. Paris, France: - Subsidence rate: up to 0.5 mm/year (0.02 in/year) (source: BRGM) - Affected areas: City center and nearby neighborhoods 5. Berlin, Germany: - Subsidence rate: up to 0.5 mm/year (0.02 in/year) (source: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences) - Affected areas: City center and surrounding areas USA 1. New Orleans, Louisiana: - Subsidence rate: up to 20 mm/year (0.8 in/year) (source: NASA) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Lower Ninth Ward and Metairie 2. Houston, Texas: - Subsidence rate: up to 30 mm/year (1.2 in/year) (source: NASA) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Houston Ship Channel and nearby neighborhoods 3. San Francisco, California: - Subsidence rate: up to 5 mm/year (0.2 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the San Francisco Bay Area and Treasure Island 4. Los Angeles, California: - Subsidence rate: up to 3 mm/year (0.12 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Los Angeles Basin and nearby neighborhoods 5. Phoenix, Arizona: - Subsidence rate: up to 5 mm/year (0.2 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Phoenix Basin and nearby neighborhoods 6. Las Vegas, Nevada: - Subsidence rate: up to 3 mm/year (0.12 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Las Vegas Valley and nearby neighborhoods 7. New York City, New York: - Subsidence rate: up to 1 mm/year (0.04 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in Manhattan and nearby neighborhoods 8. Chicago, Illinois: - Subsidence rate: up to 2 mm/year (0.08 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Chicago Loop and nearby neighborhoods 9. Miami, Florida: - Subsidence rate: up to 2 mm/year (0.08 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Miami Beach and nearby neighborhoods 10. Seattle, Washington: - Subsidence rate: up to 1 mm/year (0.04 in/year) (source: USGS) - Affected areas: Citywide, with highest rates in the Seattle Basin and nearby neighborhoods
Houston, Texas has sunk so much over the years, that the city is actually below sea level. The greatest fear is that one of these days, an extraordinary hurricane will push seawater inland, and the water will flood Houston, and they will never be able to get the salt water out.
In the Ruhr Valley (Germany) where I live due to all the coal mining that used to take place the ground has subsided, in some parts especially the north of Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Herne up to 25m. Which is absolutely insane so rivers have been diverted and more than a hundred pumping stations run around the clock to keep the urban environment from flooding since 40% of it now sits below groundwater. At least there isn't much movement anymore now that all coal mines have seized operation.
For the American Cities can't we fix the problem by injecting a chemical with greater mass & smaller laminar flow characteristics under pressure than water 🤔?? Like, say... Canadian maple syrup??
That's not exactly accurate saying the US doesn't invest in water. A poor and corrupt Flint doesn't rep the country. It's certainly not comparable to China level issues with water. Utilities and consumers bear the cost that the 50 billion the US Federal Gov throws back to states.
China is the same size as the US. But a far smaller proportion is arable and liveable. A lot of the western parts can't support a high population density. Yet China has 450% the population of the US. So they have this enormous mass of people, all crammed into their one coastline. Result: overpopulation. There is more people than the land can comfortably support. Solution: a reduction of the population. A group of scientists led by Song Jian calculated that the ideal population for China is 650-700 million. When they announced this in 1980, China's population was already far above that. It was just under 1 billion. Their recommended strategy was a sharp reduction of one-child per 2-parents, maintained for 30 - 40 years, and then raising the fertility rate back up gradually until the population stabilized at around 700 million by the year 2100. Song Jian is still alive today, retired for decades, but this has apparently become official government policy. China has been tweaking their policy to match the calculated numbers since 1980.x
The funny thing is many ppl will scream "climate change" when talking about this topic, but it is really environmental degredation. Most cities were built without taking water pathways and recharge into account. IE Seoul South Korea has a huge problem with flooding when it rains since the low areas were just concreted over. This is a huge problem in most bigger chinese cities as well. Since these issues were planned for in the beginning its almost impossible to fix now.
If I remember correctly all the water we have pumped out have altered Earth's tilt slightly. It is basically a gigantic spinning top and we remove material from random spots.
Same thing is happening in California; there is a marker of where the land was in like 1900, and now its like a full story or two below that mark. Crazy!
Thanks for the video ☺️. Your objectivity is soothing after the rest of the internet has been so diluted with opinions. Don't change please. 🐙 Cthulu approves!
Very different subsidence phenomena, but large areas of Europe are suffering from Geotechnical rebound from the kilometres of ice cover during ice age, whole of Britain is tilting back higher NW lifting up lower SE going down line Humber to Sevens mouth. Also the whole of the Netherlands is going down.
Ok, but ground water extraction has to be countered by the recharge back into the ground. So, it seems they need to increase their efforts to improve the management of aquifer recharge. Thanks for the very informative video!
California central valley also sinks with great speed. We probably should ban open air agriculture. And move all farm into large factories to better recycle the water used
Regarding the point past 13:20, ground water extraction per se should not result in subsidence IF the natural (and possible human induced) recharge rate is not exceeded by the ground water extraction rate. Subsidence depends on extraction exceeding recharge, which can be seasonally dependent. Yes, too many humans over-extract natural resources…though we already knew that.
Dont forget silt covering any air cacks that could break vapor locks and relieve the wide vacuum of falling water in high and low aquifeds and fhe moon's tidal force lifting and even worse low tide pulling on the water in the chambers, sicking tight together those surface silts trying to suck it through the old and rusty un used wells.. and those active wells also causing suction through those old groves and ancient city wells pipes gone dry the the full moon pulling up on it and washing the crubling blocks caused by the square grid of wells drilled.. like a granite quarry's bore holes, but up side down and the weight of those compressed clay blocks as well as vaccum infusion along those sand stones and clay..and when they drop to the bottom it puts more water pressure to the capped wells lines cracks and fissures some places it could be 200 feet drops untill the blocks falling fill the initial deep hollow caverns or water filled caverns you call and I too call Aquifers and under ground rivers.. .. and if the Anti Communist rebels find all of the old test boars and put charges in them and blow out and frature or fill the caverns with the natural gas and spark plug them or ligh t with flares .. the pipe heat will dry and crumble the lime stone around those well pipes, even simple lense effect spinning magnets a d lightning rod ground wires and or load and ground wires from alternating current 20 to 30 feet apart soldered on screens and put down the pipe with a concrete filled in over it then the other 50 or more fèet or at the top will hest like a broken fuse.. hard wired to the main wire and not the fuse block would get them as hot as oven coils.. and increase the sand and clay crumbling.. Imagine each of those city blocks is a set of 200 ft deep wells that make up 100 feet or more deep sized blocks and the vaccum pressure also wants to suck them down into the hole of the cavern way down below.. and then the moon also pulls on all that water and earth and wet clay or the granite that has frozen and cracked or rust of the pipes has opened the point to point pattern and then some space rod falls really fast in fhe central keystone point and punches several blocks right down into the hole..and then all the others fall ln front the inside out and all of the mud and silt to the side slides into the center of the bowl,or so e crazy kids starved for food and bug repelant and pain killers and some good spices packages got in there like granite quarry demolitions experts special forces and hung high explosives all the way down to the bottom of the aquifer floor and up the pipes all the way like the Dirty Dozen Movie with Jim Brown the Old Football Player who was in that movie... but did it all over the agriculture lands also... and all at once in many areas, they depth charge the aquifer and the pipes and it lifts and splits with the explosions it the water and continues up the pipes, blowing wide cracks the water expanding also is shooting up through... and all of it faling and giving the water all over a place to shoot up to the surface .. some might on fall against each other and pinch bit the next tide and aquifer level drop will suck the sand and rubbles down, and each rain or minorflood might be the last everyons in that city sees as the buildings topple and fall in many directions onto one another as all foundations have been washed out.. even stiff breezes leveraging the buidlings bases in a storm,opening and closing and twisting the pipes and comapcted spils into sands powder again.. soo many compounding factors and if not all fixed at once it will be forever dangerous and unlivable .
I wanna know how you keep your phone or whatever you're posting from charged while you're living in a homeless encampment and babbling on like a drug casualty crazy fentanyl addict
It's worth mentioning that Chinese agriculture still uses massive flood irrigation which is tremendously water-inefficient, especially on the North China Plain. But the communists will not let a market price mechanism dissuade excess use, so mass aquifer extraction and devastating South-North transfer goes ahead (tremendous flooding is attributable to the concentration of water flows into these canals).
@alphar9539 Plenty of underused land in South and Southwest China that could produce food, North China land is poorly productive even with water wastage. It's a political choice by the government to increase floods and soil erosion to Save Face.
7:14. I m from hong kong and we do not use groundwater at all as much of it comes from China's water supply and reservoirs in hong kong, so it s kind of strange to see it s on the list and apparently ranked just slightly better than others like shanghai. It would be nice to see tokyo and other global cities for reference, particularly those that do not use groundwater.
It remains me of Venice, Italy when they build Venecia Mestre terminals they pump out massive amounts of water and the legacy Venice city started to sink very very fast since then. You mention it fast but it was a huge mistake very expensive to repair now. Pumping the water in now is almost and impossible task. Very interesting video.
I admire your knowledge in every sense. You can explain complex topics in a way that is easy to understand. I thought you were using AI to do it, but long before AI became popular, you were already creating content like this.