Geological interpretation of current subsidence and uplift in the London area,UK, as shown by high precision satellite-based surveying

Long term planning for flood risk management in coastal areas requires timely and reliable information on changes in land and sea levels. A high resolution map of current changes in land levels in the London and Thames estuary area has been generated by satellite-based persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI), aligned to absolute gravity (AG) and global positioning system (GPS) measurements. This map has been qualitatively validated by geological interpretation, which demonstrates a variety of controlling influences on the rates of land level change, ranging from near-surface to deep-seated mechanisms and from less than a decade to more than 100,000 years’ duration.