Mexico City Is Sinking While Also Running Out of Water
Mexico City is sinking by an estimated one meter (3.2 feet) every year, while it simultaneously faces a water crisis.
The ancient Aztecs, who were conquered by the Spanish under the command of conquistador Hernán Cortés in the 1500s, were the first to build a city in the region. As they constructed their capital Tenochtitlán on top of the valley’s large lakes, they left the natural water supply intact surrounding the city. In periods of heavy rains, the city would flood but this was managed by a dike system.
After the Spanish conquered the indigenous population, they quickly expanded their empire over the next few centuries, depleting the surrounding lakes almost completely, according to NPR. After Mexico became an independent nation in 1810, the surface water near the city was more or less depleted. The city pipes in some 30 percent of its water from distant lakes and rivers today, but an increasing portion of the capital’s water also comes from a large aquifer underneath the city, causing it to sink lower year after year.
"Everywhere they pumped up groundwater from the boreholes, the ground sank. Without the water there, the sediments that the city was built on compressed a lot more," Eddie Bromhead, a geotechnical engineer at U.K.-based Kingston University, explained to The Guardian.
“It's a historic mistake the city has had to pay for more than 500 years," Ramón Aguirre Díaz, who runs Mexico City's municipal water system, told NPR. He explained that twice as much water is pumped out of the aquifer as is replaced annually. “We are depleting volumes of water that took hundreds, thousands of years to store. Sooner or later it will run out,” he said.
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