VENICE is sinking, and it is being pulled down by the tectonic plate upon which it sits.
The Italian city on the coast of the Adriatic Sea is scattered across islands and riddled with canals. Waves are lapping ever higher at its buildings, partly because of global warming, which raises the water level around 4 millimetres a year. Now Eugenio Carminati at La Sapienza University in Rome and colleagues have shown that the plate under the Adriatic is being forced downwards as it meets another underneath Italy (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 30, p 1717). The team used seismic pictures of…
