Transcript The Problem With Venice

The Problem With
Venice
Aka Venice the Menace
Venice
• A city in northeastern Italy located on a group of 117 small
islands separated by canals and linked by bridges
• The city has an average of 50,000 tourists a day
• It is regarded as one of the world's most beautiful cities
• Known for its beautiful Gothic/Renaissance/Baroque
architecture, its canals and gondolas, its Carnival festival, its
culture
Carnival
• Is held on Shrove
Tuesday (Martedi' Grasso
or Mardi Gras), the day
before Ash Wednesday,
which is the start of Lent,
which is 40 days before
Easter
• The festival is worldfamed for its elaborate
masks.
Problems with Tourism
• The city can be very overcrowded at some points of the year
• It is regarded by some as a tourist trap
• Widely known for its element of elegant decay
• The competition for foreigners to buy homes in Venice has
made prices rise so high that numerous inhabitants are forced
to move
• Cruise ships bring in a lot of tourists and money but the city’s
fragile canals need to be protected
VENICE IS SINKING
Venice is Sinking
• In the past century, the marshy land that the city sits
on has lowered by about 11 inches
• Some experts say that the city is now sinking 5 times
faster than previously thought
• Venice is also apparently tilting eastward
Why Is Venice Sinking?
• Tectonic plates
• the plate it sits on
descends just below the
region
• Compaction of the
ground
• the weight of buildings
weighing down on the
ground)
• The pumping out of
groundwater below
the city
• They stopped doing that
decades ago
AND the Sea Levels Are Rising
• In recent years,
Venice has had an
average of 100 floods
a year
• This is mostly due to
climate change
• The local Adriatic Sea
is supposed to rise
about a foot by the
end of the century
• Residents now have
to often walk on
wooden planks
(passerelle) to stay
above the
floodwaters in large
parts of the city.
HOW TO SAVE VENICE?
The MOSE Project
• Named after Moses and the parting of the Red
Sea
• It is a system of floodgates seeking to protect the
Venetian Lagoon from becoming flooded with
water from the sea.
• When inactive, the gates will lay flat on the
seafloor; when water levels rise, they will be
pumped full of air and rise above the surface to
block sea water.
The Controversy Over MOSE
• So expensive
• So far, over $7 billion
• Will it even work?
• Just a short-term fix?
• The environmental
impact
• Could hurt the
ecosystem of the
lagoon
Other Options
• One idea involves pumping water back
underneath the city
• A dozen wells surrounding Venice in a six-mile
circle would pump water into the ground over a
ten-year period
• It should stabilize the sinking and then actually
cause an uplift.
• It would be a lot cheaper than the MOSE project,
around $300 million.
• It may sound a little crazy, but it’s been done
before. Used by oil companies, this kind of
subsurface fluid injection has previously caused
land to rise in California and Canada.
Another (far-fetched) idea
• An architecture firm
has proposed building
a star-shaped city
around Venice
• It would be built higher
so it would act as a
dam
• People of Venice may
not want to have
skyscrapers blocking
their view of the ocean
Even more far-fetched…
• Floating islands and underwater tubes?
A look under the city…
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BmjCLbsU4A
Everything goes by water
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3INp81NimE What’s
holding up Venice?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH4RYm63M_g