California Is Sinking: Drought Conditions Are Causing The San Joaquin Valley To Shift By Up To A Half-Meter Annually

California is sinking. New researcher has found that ongoing droughts are causing some areas in the central California to dip by up to 50cm a year. Despite heavy higher-than-normal amounts of rain in early 2017,  when the rain stopped, drought conditions returned and the ground has continued to sink, researchers say. ‘With the heavy storms in early 2017, Californians were hopeful that the drought was over,’ said Kyle Murray, a Cornell doctoral candidate in the field of geophysics who worked on the new study in Science Advances. ‘There was a pause in land subsidence over a large area, and even uplift of the land in some areas.