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NASA Satellite Maps Alarming Scale of Mexico City Ground Collapse
New data released this week from NISAR, a joint radar satellite operated by NASA and India's space agency ISRO, has revealed that parts of Mexico City are sinking at rates exceeding 0.8 inches per month, placing the capital among the world's most rapidly subsiding major cities and drawing fresh attention to the growing threat from uncontrolled ground movement beneath densely populated urban areas.
Mexico City, a metropolis of approximately 22 million people, is built on the drained bed of an ancient lake and sits above a deep aquifer that supplies around 60 percent of the city's drinking water. Decades of excessive groundwater extraction have caused the underlying sediments to compact, pulling the surface downward in a process first recorded in the 1920s. Relentless urban expansion has compounded the problem by loading further weight onto already stressed ground. NISAR, which entered service in July 2025 as one of the most capable radar observation systems ever placed in orbit, mapped ground movement across the metropolitan area between October 2025 and January 2026. Its radar instrument, capable of collecting data through cloud cover and dense vegetation, produced imagery revealing subsidence approaching 10 inches per year in the most severely affected zones, including the grounds surrounding the city's primary international airport.
The consequences have accumulated visibly over more than a century. The Angel of Independence monument, raised in 1910 to mark the centenary of Mexican independence, has needed fourteen additional steps added to its base as the surrounding ground has dropped away. Roads throughout the city have fractured, buildings tilt at measurable angles, and damage to water distribution infrastructure has worsened an already severe supply crisis. The aquifer's sustained depletion has brought the prospect of acute water shortages progressively closer, and the sinking ground compounds that threat directly by damaging the pipes on which the distribution network depends.
David Bekaert, a project manager at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research and a member of the NISAR science team, placed the findings in a broader perspective.
The release of these measurements arrives as satellite monitoring of ground deformation has become both more precise and more commercially accessible. Radar constellations now in operation can deliver automated subsidence data at repeat intervals of a few days, enabling infrastructure owners, insurers, and urban planners to track developing instability on a continuous basis rather than through periodic field surveys. That shift in monitoring capability carries direct consequences for how ground risk is assessed and priced in cities where subsurface conditions are known to be precarious.
NISAR is designed to image all of Earth's land surface on a twelve day cycle, and the science team has indicated that comparable analyses for other major urban centres are now underway. Cities across Asia, Latin America, and parts of coastal Europe share geological conditions similar to those driving Mexico City's ongoing descent, and the volume of subsidence intelligence the mission is expected to generate over the coming years is likely to reshape significantly how those risks are understood and managed.