Shenzhen, the first special economic zone of China, has witnessed earth-shaking changes since the late 1980s. In the past 35 years, about 80 km 2 of land has been reclaimed from the sea in Shenzhen. In order to investigate coastal vertical land motions associated with land reclamation, we proposed an elaborated Point Target (PT) based Small Baseline Subset InSAR (SBAS-InSAR) strategy to process an ENVISAT ASAR ascending and descending orbits dataset both acquired from 2007 to 2010. This new strategy can not only select high density PTs but also generate a reliable InSAR measurement with full spatial resolution. The inter-comparison between InSAR-derived deformation velocities from different orbits shows a good self-consistency of the results extracted by the elaborated PT-based SBAS-InSAR strategy. The InSAR measurements show that the reclaimed land is undergoing remarkable coastal subsidence (up to 25 mm/year), especially at the Shenzhen Airport, Bao'an Center, Qianhai Bay and Shenzhen Bay. By analyzing the results together with land reclamation evolution, we conclude that the ground deformation is expected to continue in the near future, which will amplify the regional sea level rise.
This study monitors the land subsidence of the whole Pearl River Delta (PRD) (area: ~ 40,000 km2) in China using the ALOS1/PALSAR data (2006–2011) through the SBAS-InSAR method. We also analyze the relationship between the subsidence and the coastline change, river distribution, geological structure as well as the local terrain. The results show that (1) the land subsidence with the average velocity of 50 mm/year occurred in the low elevation area in the front part of the delta and the coastal area, and the area of the regions subsiding faster than 30 mm/year between 2006 and 2011 is larger than 122 km2; (2) the subsidence order and area estimated in this study are both much larger than that measured in previous studies; (3) the areas along rivers suffered from surface subsidence, due to the thick soft soil layer and frequent human interference; (4) the geological evolution is the intrinsic factor of the surface subsidence in the PRD, but human interference (reclamation, ground water extraction and urban construction) extends the subsiding area and increases the subsiding rate.
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