Home Care In Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA

Parts of California’s coastline are sinking, according to a NASA-led study published earlier this year in Science Advances. That’s bad news for sea-level rise, which poses a flood risk along the shore even without the land subsiding.

“In many parts of the world, like the reclaimed ground beneath San Francisco, the land is moving down faster than the sea itself is going up,” Marin Govorcin, the study’s lead author and a remote sensing scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says in a statement.

The study pinpoints specific areas in the state where the ground is shifting up or down. These movements—called vertical land motion—are driven by both human and natural causes, such as groundwater pumping or the actions of tectonic plates. To measure these changes, researchers used satellite radar data collected by the European Space Agency and motion velocity data from the Global Navigation Satellite System. They compared observations of the same sites between 2015 and 2023.

Statewide, the most dramatic sinking of land is happening in the Central Valley, where the ground subsides as much as eight inches per year due to groundwater withdrawal amid drought, according to the statement. In regions of the Bay Area, the land dropped by more than 0.4 inches per year as the sediment became more compact.

That “seemingly modest” drop, as NASA notes in the statement, can still expose coastal areas to more waves and allow more saltwater to infiltrate the land or get into underground aquifers. Accounting for the sinking coastlines, the scientists predict sea levels in the Bay Area could rise more than twice as much as previously thought in those hotspots.

“By 2050, sea levels in California are expected to increase between 6 and 14.5 inches (15 and 37 centimeters) higher than year 2000 levels,” according to the statement. These rises are mainly driven by melting glaciers and ice sheets, as well as warming oceans, but the land also plays a role.

Sea-level rise poses a big threat to California. As the ocean creeps higher, coastal flooding will happen more frequently, explains Laura Engeman, a coastal resilience specialist with the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a post. Some areas will flood permanently. And it’s going to be costly: 20 inches of sea-level rise could damage $17.9 billion worth of buildings, according to a 2018 climate assessment.

Some parts of the state, like the Big Sur mountains and Los Angeles’ Palos Verdes Peninsula, are descending due to slow-moving landslides likely caused by erosion. That Los Angeles community shifted as much as four inches downward every week between September 18 and October 17, 2024, the lab found.

“The speed is more than enough to put human life and infrastructure at risk,” says Alexander Handwerger, a landslide scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to Julia Jacobo at ABC News. The Palos Verdes Peninsula has been moving with landslides for at least 60 years, but its motion recently sped up because of heavy precipitation in 2023 and early 2024.

Other recent studies have also shed light on California’s geological issues. A study published in November by scientists at Stanford University found that the San Joaquin Valley, a major agricultural region in the central part of the state, is sinking at a record-breaking pace because of groundwater pumping.

“Never before has it been so rapid for such a long period of time,” Matthew Lees, the study’s lead author, told Ian James at the Los Angeles Times when the paper came out.

Additional urban areas, including Chicago and New York City, are also sinking due to settling or shifting ground and the weight of their buildings.

The NASA scientists say their findings are being used to inform updated sea-level rise guidance for the state of California.

Sheri Hastings' property sits on a slow-moving disaster; a complex of landslides in the Portuguese Bend area of Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

For nearly 70 years, this area has shifted roughly a few inches a year, but recently that pace has surged to as fast as four inches a week.

The culprit for the spike in movement is heavy rains – and runoff from nearby canyons -- brought on by a series of recent atmospheric rivers that have soaked deep into the soil, destabilizing the area.

The landslide complex on the Palos Verdes Peninsula is more than a square mile in size and reaches hundreds of feet deep in some places. It's slipping towards the Pacific Ocean.

Mike Phipps, a geologist who has been studying the shifting landscape for nearly four decades, was contracted by the city to monitor the movement. A major part of the city's approach to slow the landslide is around a dozen deep water wells that pull water from the ground and channel it into the ocean.

"It's a catastrophe, and yet some people are still able to live in their homes up here. They're kind of riding a big raft down the hill," Phipps said.

In October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and California Governor's Office of Emergency Services announced a $42 million voluntary buyout program for residents most impacted by the slide. The properties approved for buyouts will be acquired by the city and converted to open space. Of the 85 residents who applied, only an estimated 20 homes are expected to be covered by the initial funding round, according to the city.

But Hastings isn't interested.

"It's not a good deal. You get what the value of your home was two years ago. You get 75% of that. And then on top of that, you have to pay to demolish everything and have it hauled away," Hastings said.

The FEMA-funded buyout program only provides 75% of the funding for the city to buy affected properties at fair market value, while the remaining 25% is effectively absorbed by sellers, according to the program's guidelines.

Hastings said that insurance doesn't cover any of the damage to her property, either. Her life savings are now slipping away.

"Everybody thinks we're all millionaires up here. We're actually not. Our homes were our money, right? We can't just go out and buy another home," Hastings said.

Jonathan Vigliotti

Jonathan Vigliotti is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles. Vigliotti's reporting has taken him to more than three dozen countries and territories across six continents.

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A growing number of homes in Southern California are now at risk of sliding into the ocean, according to a new study by NASA researchers.

An analysis of the space agency's radar imagery revealed that, during a four-week period in the fall of 2024, land in the residential area of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County slid toward the ocean by as much as 4 inches per week.

The research proves what many residents of the coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes already feared: the land in their neighborhood is sinking so fast that it is threatening the community's own existence.

Newsweek contacted Rancho Palos Verdes city officials and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for comment by email on Friday morning, outside of standard working hours.

Why It Matters

Last year, landslides wreaked havoc in Rancho Palos Verdes, Los Angeles County, causing irreparable damage to several homes and sending parts of them into the ocean underneath. While the problem of the area's unstable land isn't new, the phenomenon has dramatically accelerated in recent years, as now proven by NASA's new analysis.

Many residents were cut from vital utilities last year for significant amounts of time, as power companies feared that the landslide made it unsafe to continue providing gas and electricity in certain areas. The struggles that residents are already facing are likely to multiply in the future, as the emergency seems bound to escalate.

What To Know

Parts of the Palos Verdes Peninsula have been affected by a slow-moving landslide for at least the past six decades, according to NASA researchers. But, last year, this motion both expanded and accelerated due to record-breaking rainfall in Southern California in 2023 and heavy rains in early 2024.

Between September 18 and October 17, 2024, the Palos Verdes Peninsula slid by an average of about 4 inches per week, NASA's JPL found.

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Using data from four flights of NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), the lab produced a map showing the motion of the landslide in the region. The zones colored in darker red indicate a faster downslope movement; the arrows represent the direction of horizontal motion; the white lines show the boundaries of the active landslide area as defined by the California Geological Survey in 2007.

This is scary data for Rancho Palos Verdes residents: last year, officials warned that more than 100 homes in the community were at risk of slipping into the ocean.

In some positive news, the landslide has decelerated since the time of NASA's analysis. According to Rancho Palos Verdes city officials, the latest data show that the average movement for the entire landslide complex has slowed down by approximately 3 percent since early December 2024.

"The Portuguese Bend Landslide has reached a steady state of movement since the end of October, while the Abalone Cove Landslide and upper Altamira Complex points continue to slightly decelerate," according to city officials.

What People Are Saying

Alexander Handwerger, the JPL landslide scientist who performed the recent NASA analysis, said: "We're seeing that the footprint of land experiencing significant impacts has expanded, and the speed is more than enough to put human life and infrastructure at risk."

Rancho Palos Verdes city officials told Fox 11 in a statement: "The City is hopeful that this trend holds with its dewatering and winterization measures and continues to urge state and federal agencies to financially support these efforts."

What Happens Next

Last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Rancho Palos Verdes after the power shutoffs. On February 4, the city's council has extended by 60 days the local emergency declarations in the landslide areas.

Last October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services also unveiled a $42 million buyout program for homeowners in the city impacted by landslides.

Under the program, applications for which have since closed, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes was to offer homeowners 75 percent of their property value. According to the LAist, the city received 85 applications.

In their latest update, city authorities said they anticipate being able to offer buyouts for 23 properties. Of these buyouts, 15 are expected for "red-tagged properties," city officials said, and eight for "yellow-tagged properties."

Destroyed homes and collapsed power lines have peppered a section section of Los Angeles County coastline that is rapidly merging with the ocean, prompting an emergency declaration, a buyout program for property owners and an alarming study from NASA.

A new report from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California sheds more light on the situation in the Palos Verdes Peninsula, a region along the Los Angeles County coast that juts into the Pacific Ocean and is home to the affluent Rancho Palos Verdes community. It sits about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

The report found that the region, long understood to be an extremely landslide-prone part of the state, moved by 16 inches toward the ocean during a four-week period last fall, when researchers used radar during aerial flights to measure the movement. That's a rate of about 4 inches every week.

Though slow-moving landslides have been a fact of the area for decades, the researchers determined the landslide-prone area has expanded. Record-breaking rainfall in September 2023 and heavy rain in early 2024 caused an acceleration.

"(T)he speed is more than enough to put human life and infrastructure at risk,” Alexander Handwerger, who performed the JPL analysis, said in a news release.

The land is moving about 80 times faster than it was in October 2022 and the active area of the landslide complex has expanded from just under 400 acres to 700 acres, according to the city of Rancho Palos Verdes. Still, there isn't believed to be a risk of a sudden catastrophic landslide event, the city said. Last year, the city said some of the landslide area had moved 10 inches in one week.

How the creeping landslides forced people out of their homes

The JPL radar flights were conducted from Sept. 18 to Oct. 17, which is shortly after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Rancho Palos Verdes because of disrupted utility services, including electricity and gas. The region's electricity company told residents that recent land movement was creating unsafe conditions for residents.

"The ground movement affecting your neighborhood has created unsafe and hazardous conditions, which have already impacted SCE's infrastructure, causing power poles to lean and power lines to fail," Southern California Edison said in July 2024. “The impact on SCE's equipment caused by these hazardous conditions increases the risk of system failure, fire ignition, or other public safety hazards.”

The next month, a collapsed power line sparked a small brush fire. More than 200 homes and businesses had power turned off by early September with the hopes of restoring power as soon as possible. Southern California Edison said last month that it would be working to restore power in parts of Rolling Hills and Rancho Palos Verdes, both part of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Later in the fall, residents in the Greater Portuguese Bend neighborhood heavily impacted by the landslides were offered a voluntary buyout to the tune of $42 million by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, according to the City News Service. Rancho Palos Verdes expects 23 properties to be part of the buyout, the city said this week.

Contributing: Anthony Robledo and Christopher Cann, USA TODAY; Paris Barraza, the Palm Springs Desert Sun