A NASA satellite mission has produced an unprecedented ground-movement map showing that Mexico City is sinking rapidly [1, 2].
The findings highlight a critical infrastructure risk for one of the world's largest metropolitan areas. Because the city is built on soft lake-bed sediments, the accelerating subsidence threatens the stability of buildings, roads, and water systems.
According to the latest analysis, which covered the period from October 2025 to January 2026, the maximum measured subsidence rate is greater than two cm per month [1, 2]. This data provides a high-resolution look at how different sectors of the city are dropping at varying speeds.
Researchers said the sinking is driven primarily by excessive groundwater extraction [1]. As water is pumped out of the aquifers, the remaining soil compacts, causing the land surface to collapse downward.
This is not a new phenomenon, but the scale is significant. The city has experienced a total vertical drop of approximately 12 meters over the last century [1]. The new satellite imagery allows scientists to track these shifts with a precision previously unavailable.
Local authorities and urban planners must now contend with a landscape that is physically shifting beneath them. The NASA data serves as a baseline for predicting which neighborhoods are most at risk of structural failure as the ground continues to compact [1, 2].
“Mexico City is sinking at rates exceeding two cm per month.”
The precision of NASA's latest mapping transforms the understanding of Mexico City's subsidence from a general trend into a specific, localized risk map. By linking groundwater extraction directly to monthly subsidence rates, the data underscores that the city's water management crisis is not just a resource issue, but a geological threat that could lead to widespread structural collapse if extraction is not curtailed.
