Worth adding some context to this study. We've known about subsidence in our area for many many years. The Houston-Galveston subsidence district was created almost 50 years ago by the Texas legislature to regulate groundwater withdrawal and manage subsidence. https://hgsubsidence.org/ It's worth noting that this regulation has drastically slowed subsidence, but not completely halted due to the groundwater problem, and an exploding population.
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
Thanks for the arcgis link. It is interesting to compare to the Sentinel 1A data from the study[0]. For example there is one existing (ground based) measurement East of Mont Belvieu (P050), but most of the displacement in the satellite data appears just to the West, centered on Mont Belvieu. This is by eye only, so I may be mistaken in comparing the locations.
The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
Houston is an experiment in what you get when you YOLO building regulations. One should expect them to re-learn all of the lessons of the past that caused those regulations to be written. It's basically a case study in technical debt from an urban planning angle. The lack of regulation made it cheap to build and allowed the city to rapidly expand, but also allowed it to sprawl almost beyond reason and caused it to become the poster child for poor city planning and a costly reminder of how hard it is to go back and try to fix problems after the fact.
Just about every new housing development in the greater Houston area starts like this: Acquire some cheap farmland not too far from a highway, come in and sub-divide the lots, build some kind of neighborhood amenity (pool, rec center, etc.), and creat a Municipal Utility District with on-site well and sewer.
None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
With such little regulation, I would have guessed housing supply would be really great and prices quite affordable. But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.
Every urban planning enthusiast online says without artificial zoning, there would be no sprawl and everything would be a walkable paradise with a healthy mix of shops and housing close by. But then Texas comes up and the narrative flips somehow.
You're making the same mistake as all the people that hand wring about "America doesn't regulate/ban <thing that is regulated/banned at the state level but not federally>. Houston the city doesn't regulate a lot of things. But its various neighborhood associations (which are somewhat comparable to town governments on the East coast and council governments in the UK) regulate at lot of that stuff instead.
That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
Sprawl and monster trucks everywhere are still a product of intentional government interference in Houston, it's just they call it ordinances and traffic engineering rather than zoning.
From what I remember, houston was surrouded by unincorporated areas that it would eventually assimilate. I believe the unincorporated areas would not have the building requirements of houston and the houses there would be grandfathered in.
Can't comment on the specific contents of the linked research paper, but just a note that space-based measurements of subsidence have become a lot more routine with the development of Interferometric SAR (InSAR). You can get spatial maps of subsidence using the ~monthly/weekly overpasses of the radar, to ~several cm accuracy. It works better over some terrains than others.
People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads and pipelines.
Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water being taken out and not replaced).
That area is now subsiding at over a meter every year. Luckily the state will bail out the guy responsible for the subsidence by spending billions to fix the aqueducts.
There’s a Houston suburb that sank due to subsistence and had to be abandoned several decades ago. As I understand it, that was a big wake-up call, and things here have improved quite a bit since then. Though not everywhere, apparently.
> His team found substantial subsidence in Katy, Spring, The Woodlands, Fresno and Mont Belvieu with groundwater and oil and gas withdrawal identified as the primary cause.
I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s) but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
Water rights are going to be a hot topic. There just isn't enough for everyone, and sharing a commons is not something that America (and other western societies) has been good at.
There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the price of water.
You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I would argue they will become wars in certain places and in others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead over several decades.
There’s plenty for everyone. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of cutbacks in the few regions where we’ve just started getting contentious. Saying otherwise makes you an intentional or unintentional mouthpiece for agriculture which dominates water usage and hardly pays anything for it.
> very little changed at least as far as the climate is concerned.
I've lived in S. Florida and in Houston. Humidity is similar, but Florida is far more comfortable because it is surrounded by ocean, there's always an off shore breeze, and whenever it does get too hot, it always thunderstorms for about an hour pretty much every afternoon when it gets hot. With the ocean breezes and the daily short sunbursts, the air is really clean.
I recall once getting back to my apartment in Houston after work, and I took a shower like I did everyday after work. Had to, always got soaking wet from sweat on the commute home, even with AC. I forgot my wallet in the car, and I knew never ever to leave my wallet in the car in Houston. Walked out to get it, maybe it was all of 30 yards through the parking lot and back 30 yards. I had to take another shower. Never forgot my wallet again. And when it rains in Houston it rains for days on end. And you just know with all those refineries and traffic that Houston air is horrid. Must smell like money to the residents. The only thing I miss about Houston is the Tex-Mex, which is just as good in Austin but without the humidity.
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
What I hate about these edgelord philosophies (see antinatalism also) is that they present a difficult problem but intentionally provide no solution. Like what do you suggest? The human race collectively ends itself? A global authoritarian state controls the birth rate? It's better to now dwell on the this train of thought and deal with individual problems.
Many animals will multiply and consume available resources without stopping. Cute bunnies left to their own devices on a lush meadow will multiply and keep eating grass until the is little grass left, upon which they will die en masse. Invasive fish crowd everything else out, insects that eat whole swaths of forest leaving no remaining habitat for themselves.
Perhaps animals who are territorial and fight, within-species, for territory can be considered to have a mechanism of self-regulating their consumption of resources.
Humans are perhaps the only animal that will even consciously contemplate the consequences of their actions on the environment. We are, I would say, the furthest from the virus.
the funny thing is no, this is how basically every organism works. take an invasive species and introduce it somewhere, if there are no natural predators and the environment is good for it the species will multiply and thrive and explode in population. it will suck up resources until it runs out and then there will be a die off.
man is just better at avoiding this last die off part.
They achieve that "natural equilibrium" by starving en masse.
It's why I started hunting deer in my country - no natural predators, so they'll breed until they outbreed the carrying capacity of the forests they browse, and then they'll suffer long and agonising deaths, and in their desperation will devastate the forest, eating anything that's remotely edible, seedlings gone, bark stripped from adult trees.
[+] [-] chomp|3 years ago|reply
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
USGS has a network of sensors that you use to see subsidence here: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e5c75a...
Of note is Katy's subsidence, which I believe is from hydrocarbon withdrawals.
I believe what this study does that's new is analyze Sentinel-1A data and correlate it to hotspots in the Houston area, which is actually super cool.
[+] [-] quarterdime|3 years ago|reply
The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/15/3831# [1] https://hgsubsidence.org/GPS/2021/P050_HRF20_neu_cm.col
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
[1]http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/z-subsidence.html
[+] [-] victor106|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pitaj|3 years ago|reply
1: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...
[+] [-] ranrotx|3 years ago|reply
None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fshbbdssbbgdd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmaswell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reducesuffering|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|3 years ago|reply
My heavily zoned hometown Oakland does.
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|3 years ago|reply
That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
[+] [-] Schroedingersat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|3 years ago|reply
Also, speaking of groundwater.
never drain your pool in houston.
bad things will happen.
[+] [-] RockingGoodNite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mturmon|3 years ago|reply
People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads and pipelines.
Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water being taken out and not replaced).
Here's a summary with a nice motivational picture showing meters of subsidence over multiple years in the California central valley: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/land-subsidence
[+] [-] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nocoiner|3 years ago|reply
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
[+] [-] bdcravens|3 years ago|reply
I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s) but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
[+] [-] briandear|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the price of water.
You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I would argue they will become wars in certain places and in others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead over several decades.
[+] [-] kortilla|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msandford|3 years ago|reply
I moved 1000mi from Florida to here and very little changed at least as far as the climate is concerned.
[+] [-] goblinux|3 years ago|reply
https://www.bayouswamptours.com/bayou-vs-swamp-whats-the-dif...
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
I've lived in S. Florida and in Houston. Humidity is similar, but Florida is far more comfortable because it is surrounded by ocean, there's always an off shore breeze, and whenever it does get too hot, it always thunderstorms for about an hour pretty much every afternoon when it gets hot. With the ocean breezes and the daily short sunbursts, the air is really clean.
I recall once getting back to my apartment in Houston after work, and I took a shower like I did everyday after work. Had to, always got soaking wet from sweat on the commute home, even with AC. I forgot my wallet in the car, and I knew never ever to leave my wallet in the car in Houston. Walked out to get it, maybe it was all of 30 yards through the parking lot and back 30 yards. I had to take another shower. Never forgot my wallet again. And when it rains in Houston it rains for days on end. And you just know with all those refineries and traffic that Houston air is horrid. Must smell like money to the residents. The only thing I miss about Houston is the Tex-Mex, which is just as good in Austin but without the humidity.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NautilusWave|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pGuitar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Victerius|3 years ago|reply
- Agent Smith, The Matrix
[+] [-] vlunkr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markwkw|3 years ago|reply
Perhaps animals who are territorial and fight, within-species, for territory can be considered to have a mechanism of self-regulating their consumption of resources.
Humans are perhaps the only animal that will even consciously contemplate the consequences of their actions on the environment. We are, I would say, the furthest from the virus.
[+] [-] collegeburner|3 years ago|reply
man is just better at avoiding this last die off part.
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|3 years ago|reply
It's why I started hunting deer in my country - no natural predators, so they'll breed until they outbreed the carrying capacity of the forests they browse, and then they'll suffer long and agonising deaths, and in their desperation will devastate the forest, eating anything that's remotely edible, seedlings gone, bark stripped from adult trees.
[+] [-] FiniteField|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kye|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carabiner|3 years ago|reply
Ah I thought this was from Shrek 2.