The Issue of Land Subsidence in Coastal and Alluvial Plains: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

Land subsidence (LS) is becoming one of the major problems in coastal and delta cities worldwide. Understanding the current LS situation and the research trends is of paramount importance for further studies and addressing future international research networks. We analyzed the LS-related literature available from the Scopus database. The use of a single database avoided the redundancy of articles, while excluding some subject areas was useful to obtain only studies related to LS. By using VOSviewer and CiteSpace tools, we conducted a bibliometric analysis by considering title, keywords, and abstract to identify the temporal development, the geographical origin, and the area of study of the research. The results revealed a considerable heterogeneity of approaches, thematics, study areas, and research output trends. China, the US, and Italy are the major contributors to the scientific production, but the higher number of articles is not always related to the extension of the LS phenomenon in these countries. The monitoring approach differs worldwide, and univocal modeling is still lacking; from the analysis of the keywords, it is clear that the focus of most studies is on the relationship with the hydrological/hydrogeological aspects. Since the 2000s, however, the development of SAR technologies has boosted the study of the phenomenon from a different point of view.

The Geohazard as Land Subsidence in Anthropocene, India

“…Land subsidence due to sinking has become a national crisis to many countries in the world such as Jakarta, Beijing, and Bangkok of Thailand, [2,3]). Land subsidence at a faster rate has been globally observed at @0.75m/yr in petroleum and high-carbon gas extraction oil fields, Mayuga et al [4,5,6,7,8]). In SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) is employed to guess the relative prompt distortion due to geological disasters like earthquakes, Landslides, glacier shifts, slow subsidence, and uplift over the earth's crust, [7,8,9].…”

“…Report of land subsidence (LS) is of recent origin (60YBP) in Shanghai City in China with an average land subsidence rate (ASLR) of 7cm/year and increasing with the rise in RSLR [24,8]. Land Subsidence is triggered by groundwater (GW) withdrawal in emerging and expanding urban areas with rising populations [25,26].…”

Land subsidence risk assessment along metro lines in Shanghai using InSAR monitoring data and optical images

“…Land subsidence has emerged as a significant global geo-environmental issue intensified by human activities (Pacheco-Martínez et al 2015;Bhattarai and Kondoh 2017;Bagheri et al 2021;Buffardi and Ruberti 2023;Xu et al 2023;Sadeghi et al 2023). Compared to violent geological activities such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, land subsidence progresses slowly, exhibiting characteristics such as proneness to occurrence, irreversibility, and gradual accumulation (Hu et al 2009;Nduji et al 2023;Zhang et al 2023c).…”

“…Therefore, it can pose significant risks to the development of human society over time. Regarding economic losses associated solely with land subsidence, it is estimated that the costs have reached billions of dollars annually worldwide (Erkens et al 2015;Kok and Costa 2021;Buffardi and Ruberti 2023). The threat to urban safety posed by land subsidence is particularly evident in its impact on the safe operation of infrastructure such as metro lines, elevated roads, bridges, and buildings, presenting significant challenges to the sustainable development of cities (Liu et al 2015;Zhao et al 2023;Ahmadi et al 2023;Ku and Liu 2023).…”

“…The rapid advancement of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology has propelled research into various aspects of land subsidence, including risk assessment (Buffardi and Ruberti 2023). Its advantages in high resolution, precision, short cycle, and large-scale monitoring provide a robust and rich data foundation for risk assessment (Pacheco-Martínez et al 2015;Zhang et al 2023c;Xu et al 2023;Nduji et al 2023).…”