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Mexico City Is Going Down, and NASA Just Measured It

Mexico City was built on a drained lake, and the lake has never fully agreed to the arrangement.

In April 2026, NASA released the first measurements from NISAR — a radar satellite launched in 2025 that can track ground movement from orbit to within a centimetre. It found that Mexico City is sinking by roughly 25 centimetres a year. In the worst-affected spots, including the international airport and the ground beneath the Angel of Independence, it is going down by more than two centimetres every month.

Human fingernails grow about 40 millimetres a year. Parts of this city are descending faster than that.

The cumulative figure is the one that stops you: in less than a century, the ground has dropped more than twelve metres. An engineer first wrote the problem down in 1925. Nobody has been able to stop it since, because the cause is that twenty million people need water and the water is being pumped out from underneath them.

You can see the result without instruments. The cathedral leans. Doorframes have gone diamond-shaped. Sections of the Metro have been bent out of true by ground that will not stay still.

The clock: in October 2022, after twenty-six years of it, Mexico abolished daylight saving time nationwide. The argument that finally won was not about energy or commerce. It was about children walking to school in the dark.

Mexico City is now permanently fixed at UTC−6, and the matter is considered closed. Which puts it in a small and growing club: Türkiye froze its clocks in 2016, Brazil in 2019, Mexico in 2022. Three enormous countries on three continents, quietly reaching the same conclusion — moving the clock never actually made the day any longer.

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