Climate change could be having significant effects below the Earth’s surface that are only just starting to receive the attention they warrant. Warnings about the possible consequences of climate change tend to focus on the most dramatic and visible effects. The ice caps diminish, major cities flood as sea levels rise, urban areas become uninhabitable due to increasing temperatures – all are easy to depict even if the scenario is decades away.
Increasingly, scientists are warning that we should start looking down and assessing how human activity and the extreme weather conditions attributed to it are slowly but surely undermining the infrastructure we rely on. Whether it’s making buildings unstable, corroding pipes and cables or disrupting road surfaces, underground climate change is an emerging threat that will require some innovative thinking and new design approaches.
It’s no secret that the soaring value of land in urban areas is encouraging exploitation of subterranean assets. Elaborate basements below the most expensive homes, incorporating garages, cinemas and even swimming pools, are the tip of the iceberg. Retail and office developments are optimising sub-levels, competing for space with underground transport links.
All this activity appears to be amplifying the underground element of the phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect: energy diffusing from subsurface buildings and trains is estimated to be causing temperatures below cities to increase at a rate of up to 2.5°C per decade.