Geophysicist: Weight of Harvey Rains Caused Houston to Sink

The downtown Houston skyline and flooded highway 288 on Aug. 27, 2017.

Photographer: Thomas B. Shea/AFP via Getty Images
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Houston (AP) -- A California geophysicist says the sheer weight of the torrential rains brought by Harvey has caused Houston to sink by 2 centimeters.

Chris Milliner, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, says water weighs about a ton per cubic meter and the flooding was so widespread that it "flexed Earth's crust."