A Parched Mexico City Is Now Sinking Almost a Foot Per Year

Mexico City is the true metropolis of North America, an ancient hub of commerce and culture with a metro area population greater than that of Los Angeles, New York, Toronto or almost anything else in its hemisphere. It’s also perpetually on the verge of collapse, thanks to a multi-year water crisis that shows few signs of abating, and another phenomenon fueled by the same lack of water in an area that was originally rich with it: Subsidence. Or “sinking,” in other words. The entire city has been sinking at this point for well more than a century, but the rate of that sinking has only become more dramatic and visible over time. According to newly available satellite data from NASA, using a radar system that maps the movement of the ground under our feet, we can see that on average, Mexico City is subsiding (sinking) nearly a foot per year on average, though in some areas this can be drops of up to 20 inches. This can cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure of a city of 22 million people, on a scale that may be beyond the power of any government to tackle.

Human beings have occupied the land that is now Mexico City since at least 1325, the date modern Mexico eventually settled on as the founding of Tenochtitlan, once the capital of the widespread Aztec Empire. There, they built a settlement upon a marshy island in the middle of a great body of water, Lake Texcoco. After the arrival of Spanish explorers and the downfall of the empire, Tenochtitlan was razed and the roots of Mexico City were built directly atop the ruins, in many cases using the same blocks of stone that had once held up Aztec temples. Some of Mexico City’s most iconic structures, such as the Metropolitan Cathedral, which began its construction in 1573, still include some of this stonework … slowly sinking and cracking as the ground beneath it gives way. The unlevel foundation of buildings like the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe make the issue of subsidence harder to ignore, being very clearly visible in photos.

Mexico City is sinking faster than previously thought. US-Indian Space Mission Maps Extreme Subsidence in Mexico City – NASA www.nasa.gov/missions/nis…

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— Karl Miller Lugo (@karlmiller.bsky.social) May 3, 2026 at 5:59 PM

The main reason for all the sinking in Mexico City is a lack of water in what was once a vast lake and underground aquifer. The vast majority of the city’s water is supplied by these local aquifers directly under its feet, but as the population has continued to surge and human-driven climate change has altered the amounts of replenishing rainfall the area tends to receive during its wet season, a severe shortfall has emerged: Mexico City requires far more water than it replenishes into its aquifers on a yearly basis. Aging infrastructure, further damaged by the sinking, means that waste becomes rampant as well: A shocking 40% of all the water pumped through Mexico City’s pipes is estimated to be lost due to leaks and pipe breaks before it ever reaches its intended consumer. This of course just fuels a vicious cycle: Pump more, lose more, sink more. Climate change is a huge factor as well, as by the mid-2020s, more than 70% of the country was in multi-year drought conditions due to lack of rainfall, which has thankfully abated in most places, although the city itself still remains perilously dry.

“So the reservoirs are basically empty,” said Enrique Lomnitz, founder of a water nonprofit called Isla Urbana working to address the problem in Mexico City. “That’s 30, 40% of the city’s water that we’re no longer getting or we’re getting like a, like a trickle where we used to have a stream. So we’re not recharging our aquifers. We’re pumping an enormous, crazy amount of water out of the ground, because there’s 22 million people over here. And that is the basis of the problem.”

Without the water beneath their feet, the ground inevitably begins to shift and compact under the sheer weight of the skyscrapers and millions of people, cars and layers of cement built on top of it. Buildings crack and lean. Streets buckle and water pipes burst. Even subway tunnels become unstable, and the Mexico City Metro is one of the most highly traversed and crucial pieces of urban mass transportation in the world, setting the stage for potentially deadly accidents. The National Autonomous University of Mexico estimates that the city’s overall drop has been more than 39 feet in less than a century, the kind of sinking that literally involves installing new stairways at various points so you can still reach the entrances to buildings that would have become inaccessible. The famed Angel of Independence statue along the Paseo de la Reforma was built in 1910, and has had 14 additional steps added to its base thanks to the ground around it sinking.

“It damages part of the critical infrastructure of Mexico City, such as the subway, the drainage system, the water, the potable water system, housing and streets,” said Enrique Cabral, a geophysics researcher at the aforementioned UNAM. “It’s a very big problem. We have one of the fastest velocities of land subsidence in the whole world.”

A city of 22 million people is in very real danger. Water is a major issue for Mexico City. Dropping 10 inches a year is frightening. Madam President, thank you for your help, all those people are at serious risk.

www.huffpost.com/entry/mexico…

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— Thomas W. Hanson 🌎🇺🇸 🇺🇾 (@thomasw.bsky.social) May 2, 2026 at 10:29 AM

That velocity can now be measured more accurately and displayed more dramatically than ever before, thanks to tools that can measure it from space. NASA’s Synthetic Aperture Radar mission (NISAR), a joint project between the U.S. and Indian space agencies, launched in 2025 as the world’s most expensive and advanced earth observation satellite, and has provided stark imagery showing just how much of Mexico City is rapidly sinking into the Earth. Recently released analysis was based on measurements taken by NISAR between Oct. 2025-Jan. 2026 during the dry season, and dramatically illustrate the city center–including areas like the Benito Juarez International Airport–in the areas of heaviest subsidence. As Elon Musk might say about an international airport servicing 50 million people a year being built on profoundly unstable ground: “Concerning.”

Although the nation and the city have long dragged their feet on addressing the issue in a comprehensive way, they can hardly claim to not be aware of it. The sinking of Mexico City has been measured for more than 100 years, but only more recently, since the height of the water crisis, has the municipal government and federal apparatus begun to truly consider long-term mitigation. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum should understand this better than most: In addition to being an environmental engineer by training, she was also literally the mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, during the very worst heights of the water crisis. She attempted to take on the multi-pronged issue by limiting the further drawing of groundwater from Mexico City wells, establishing new water sources and embarking on extensive campaigns of pipe repair, but it’s difficult for all of these measures to not feel like chewing gum being hastily applied to a crumbling dam.

Large-scale efforts to address both the city’s water issues and sinking would involve many billions more in funding, and even then, it’s possible that the continued sinking would simply erase the gains as quickly as they are made. The Mexican government is locked in what may be a losing battle here, but it’s not as if abandoning the city to the Earth is an option, either. The city’s 22 million residents remain subject to colonial decisions made more than 450 years ago, by people who could never have known at the metropolis they would build on this spot would one day be in danger of sloughing off into a pit. Can one of the world’s most historically rich cities be saved?