The Chinese city has reclaimed land from shallow coastal waters at a rapid rate.
The Chinese metropolitan area of Shanghai has ranked high on lists of economic and population growth in recent decades. So it is hardly surprising that the city of 24 million people stands out in another way: the amount of new land that people have created, or “reclaimed.”
Two recently published studies list Shanghai as the world’s leading city for land reclamation, a land-creation process that typically involves dredging and draining shallow coastal areas using ships, pumps, and mud. The studies are based analyses of Landsat satellite imagery.
While reclaimed land is typically used for ports, industry, and housing, Shanghai stands out for devoting some of its new land to parks, forests, and wetlands. That tendency is visible in this pair of images from 2016 and 2019, acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. Nanhui is a newly-built city in Pudong on Hangzhou Bay, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) from downtown Shanghai.
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Image via NASA Earth Observatory
