Climate change could be having significant effects below the Earth’s surface that are only just starting to receive the attention they warrant.
Warnings about the possible consequences of climate change tend to focus on the most dramatic and visible effects. The ice caps diminish, major cities flood as sea levels rise, urban areas become uninhabitable due to increasing temperatures – all are easy to depict even if the scenario is decades away.
Increasingly, scientists are warning that we should start looking down and assessing how human activity and the extreme weather conditions attributed to it are slowly but surely undermining the infrastructure we rely on. Whether it’s making buildings unstable, corroding pipes and cables or disrupting road surfaces, underground climate change is an emerging threat that will require some innovative thinking and new design approaches.
It’s no secret that the soaring value of land in urban areas is encouraging exploitation of subterranean assets. Elaborate...