Hurricane Harvey is set to be one of the costliest natural catastrophe in American history . It was both unusually crocked and exceedingly sluggish , and as a result , it dumped a whopping125 trillion liters(33 trillion gallon ) of rainfall on the US , mostly on Texas – more than four time that let loose by 2005 ’s Katrina .
Last week , geoscientistChris Millinerof NASA ’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) sent out a tweet that contained a rather startling map . As various GPS markers across Houston have bring out , the city really sank a little as Harvey dumped all of its downfall on the inauspicious metropolis .
Of course , a lot of the metropolis was underwater , but this is n’t quite what we mean here . There was actually so much rainfall that the Earth ’s crust itself was depressed by around two centimeters ( about 0.8 in ) for a few daytime . That may not sound like much until you remember that garble the surface of the satellite is n’t actually easy .
A childlike calculation byThe Atlanticsuggests around 125 gigatonnes ( 275 trillion pound sterling ) of water fall from the sky back then . That ’s a difficult identification number to ideate , so permit ’s just say that the water weighed the same as 155,342 Golden Gate Bridges . It ’s about the same as 77 percent of the total estimated mass of Mount Everest .
Mount Everest , by the way , can not get much taller . If it did , the crust beneath it would lead off to go down in response . So it ’s safe to say that a veritable mountain of water system landing mostly on Houston had the same effect , except in this slip , the land was forced downwards .
Someone asked Milliner if the GPS reading was simply due to the concretion of unconsolidated , arenaceous soil that was simply sinking under the weight of the urine . Not so , tell the scientist : The “ subsidence is beyond noise level . ” Although some dirt compaction may be a gene here , if the ground rebounds and moves upwards again as the waters retreat that will confirm the crustal warping theory .
Another mortal asked Milliner aboutclimate change . As we ’ve previously reported here , climate variety does n’t “ cause ” hurricanes , but it certainly makes them bed wetter and more powerful . Thus , it ’s good to say that Harvey ’s record - break rainfall was worse than it should have been .
In reaction to the query , Milliner says : “ Unfortunately , [ clime alteration ] is very veridical . You do n’t have to conceive political leader , just expect at the data point and science . ”
