South Africa Is Rising And Scientists Now Know Why

South Africa is slowly rising out of the ocean, by up to two millimetres a year, and scientists now believe there’s a good chance that climate change is behind it.

A new study has found that this uplift is strongly linked to severe droughts and the loss of water from reservoirs, soil and groundwater, rather than the previously suspected underground mantle activity.

“We started to think there should be a link between this pattern and water loss,” Dr Makan Karegar, one of the study’s co-authors, told Live Science. “We believe that it [is] also possible that a loss of groundwater and surface water is responsible for the land uplift.”

Using a network of static GPS receivers across South Africa, researchers from the University of Bonn recorded an average land rise of 6mm between 2012 and 2020. The largest uplift was observed between 2015 and 2019, during one of the country’s worst droughts, when Cape Town nearly reached “Day Zero,” which is the point at which municipal water supplies would be shut off.

Christian Mielke, also of the University of Bonn, added that “The total mass of surface water, soil moisture, and groundwater is so large that it deforms the Earth’s crust, like putting pressure on an elastic ball.”

Researchers say the uplift may not be permanent but could be a valuable new tool for drought monitoring.