Hotspots beneath cities deform the ground, causing important infrastructure to crack under stress
The streets, sidewalks and roofs of cities all absorb heat during the day, making some urban areas up to six degrees Fahrenheit hotter than rural ones during the day—and 22 degrees F hotter at night. These “urban heat islands” can also develop underground as the city heat diffuses downward, beneath the surface. And basements, subway tunnels and other subterranean infrastructure also constantly bleed heat into the surrounding earth, creating hotspots.
“For a lot of things in the subsurface, it’s kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’” says Grant Ferguson, an engineering geologist at the University of Saskatchewan, who was not involved in the new study. The underground world teems with life, however. It is home to animals that have adapted to subterranean living such as worms, snails, insects, crustaceans and salamanders.
He collected three years of temperature data from more than 150 sensors installed in basements, train tunnels and parking garages underneath Chicago’s downtown Loop district. For comparison, sensors were also installed in the ground beneath Grant Park, which is located in the Loop, along the shore of Lake Michigan.
Kathrin Menberg, a geoscientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, who was not involved in Rotta Loria’s study, says these displacement predictions are orders of magnitude higher than what she would have guessed and could be linked to Chicago’s soft, clay-heavy soils. “Clay material is particularly sensitive,” she says. “It would be a big issue in all cities worldwide that are built on such material.
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