This is the Guardian.

The World's Cities, The world's cities, full of vast megastructures and high-rise buildings,

have long tried to push skywards, making the most of the spare vertical space available.

But that's getting harder and harder because they're also

sinking and fast. Recent surveys have found that nearly half of China's major cities are sinking,

and now a new study has found that more than two dozen US coastal cities are dropping by over two millimeters a year.

Dozens of cities along the U.S coastline are sinking at alarming rates.

That's according to a report published in the journal Nature yesterday,

New York City, Atlantic City, Virginia Beach,

Charleston and Savannah are among the city sinking the most on the East Coast.

Then there's Jakarta in Indonesia. The north of the city is going down by about 5 centimeters every year and it's already sunk by 2.5 meters in the last decade alone.

The situation has gotten so bad the government is abandoning the capital and moving it a thousand kilometers away

building a new city on the island of Borneo.

But that's nothing compared to Iran's capital city, Tehran.

Some areas there are subsiding by 25 centimeters a year.

And all this means that sea level rises could be a whole lot worse than we first thought.

So-called nuisance flooding is increasing, not just because the sea is rising, but because the land is sinking.

So today, why is the land beneath our feet sinking, and what can we do about it?

From the Guardian I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.

Manutcha Shese is a professor of environmental security and remote sensing at Virginia Tech and director of the Earth Observation and Innovation Lab. He studies where and how quickly land is sinking.

Land's subsidence is a big problem driven by different processes, part the natural, partly

anthropogenic or human mates.

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