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Estimated Subsidence Rates
Average ground movement observed in sinking zones
Primary Sources
Mexico City has been sinking for over a century. A new NASA satellite ...
More than 20 million people in Mexico City are living on ground that's sinking above an ancient reservoir. The city has long been recognized as one of the fastest sinking sites in the world, but researchers didn't have the ability to continuously track the movement from space until now.NASA shared a satellite image on Wednesday from the U.S.-India satellite NISAR that captures parts of Mexico's capital sinking by more than half an inch every single month. The space agency said the impact of those incremental changes have added up over time, leading to "fracturing roads, buildings, and water lines" across the city.New data from NISAR shows where Mexico City and its environs subsided by up to a few centimeters per month (shown in blue) between Oct. 25, 2025, and Jan. 17, 2026. Uneven and seemingly small elevation changes have added up over the decades, fracturing roads, buildings, and water lines.David Bekaert/JPL-Caltech//NASA Dora Carreón-Freyre, a researcher who has studied Mexico City's sinking for more than 25 years, has seen that damage up close in the Iztapalapa region, which she says is one of the hardest hit."The houses that are founded in [volcanic] rock are stable, but the houses in the middle between the rock and the lacustrine plain are already broken, most of them," Carreón-Freyre told ABC News. "In 2017, a taxi fell inside a fracture." Over the years, scientists studying the city’s land subsidence, a scientific term for sinking, primarily relied on ground and space satellites that could only collect annual data.NASA says NISAR is the first satellite to carry two radar systems at different wavelengths, allowing it to record near real-time ground movement changes from space every 12 days. For David Bekaert, a scientist who works on the NISAR mission, that frequency is what makes the data so valuable."This all allows us to build time series or snapshots on how the ground is moving over time," Bekaert told ABC News.For researchers who have spent decades studying the city on foot, the new satellite data offers something they never had before.In this June 15, 2016, file photo, people walk past a slightly tilted historic building in downtown Mexico City. The city was built on a drained lake bed and many buildings are noticeably tilted, from sinking unevenly into the soft earth over decades or centuries.Rebecca Blackwell/AP, FILE"To have these tools and to realize the distribution of these differential rates –it's amazing," Carreón-Freyre said. "Thing...
Mexico City is sinking faster than ever, new NASA data reveals
Today's Mexico City is sinking by nearly 10 inches (about 25 centimeters) per year, and has sunk by nearly 40 feet over the past century.
NASA NISDAR mission shows rapid sinking of Mexico City
Mexico City's been sinking for a century, but a new NASA mission has shown just how quickly the capital city is sliding into the Earth.
NASA radar captures parts of Mexico City are dropping faster than ...
Science News: New NASA radar technology reveals alarming rates of subsidence in Mexico City, as some areas sink over half an inch monthly.
