Environment
D.C. Is Packing on Huge Amounts of Impervious Surfaces
The city has added “1 million cubic meters of pavement, buildings, and the like every year for nearly three decades,” researchers say.
The only way to have not noticed a development boom in Washington, D.C., is if you were living at the bottom of the Potomac River. Now we can actually see the huge spread of pavement and eruptions of edifices, thanks to these maps of impervious surfaces from 1984 and 2010.
NASA based the images on a recent study of Landsat data by researchers at the University of Maryland. Blue areas depict dense accumulations of mostly humanmade surfaces like asphalt and rooftops; white ones have low concentrations of such things. Here’s 1984: