When floodwater rolls across St. Mark’s Square, it does not arrive with a roar. It seeps up through the stone, pooling around the boots of tourists and the doorsteps of the few thousand residents who still call central Venice home. The city has always negotiated with the sea, but the terms are shifting. A peer-reviewed study now proposes a response that sounds more like science fiction than civil engineering: pumping fluid deep underground to physically raise Venice by up to 30 centimeters over a decade.
The idea, published in the American Geophysical Union journal Water Resources Research by a team led by hydrogeologist Pietro Teatini at the University of Padua, has gained renewed attention in early 2026 as separate research extends sea level rise projections for the Venetian lagoon out to 2150 and a comparative analysis warns that the city’s current defenses could hit hard limits well before the century ends.
The case for lifting the ground beneath Venice
Teatini and colleagues modeled a ring of injection wells targeting deep aquifers beneath and around the lagoon. Their simulations predict that pumping seawater or other fluid into those formations could produce a controlled, broadly uniform uplift of roughly 25 to 30 centimeters over about 10 years. The wells would reach formations deep enough to avoid disturbing the wooden pilings and compacted sediment that support Venice’s buildings, and the modeled uplift spreads gradually rather than tilting individual structures.
No pilot well has been drilled. No regulatory review for large-scale injection beneath a UNESCO World Heritage Site has been made public. The study is a proof of concept, not an engineering blueprint. But it establishes, through peer-reviewed physics, that subsurface uplift could in principle counteract decades of subsidence and sea level gain in a single intervention.
MOSE: 100 rescues and counting
Venice is not waiting for theoretical solutions. Since becoming operational, the MOSE barrier system, a set of 78 movable gates at the three inlets connecting the lagoon to the Adriatic, has been raised more than 100 times to block high tides. The Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport announced the 100th activation between 2020 and 2025, estimating that the barriers had prevented more than 2.6 billion euros in flood damage. Each closure keeps the Adriatic from pouring into the city’s streets, churches, and ground-floor shops.
Those numbers confirm something important: Venice already depends on engineered intervention for routine survival, not just for rare catastrophic storms. But MOSE was designed for the sea levels of the late 20th century. As baseline water rises, the gates will need to close more often and stay closed longer, raising questions about navigation, lagoon ecology, and long-term maintenance costs. The system’s troubled construction history, marked by billions in overruns and a major corruption scandal that led to dozens of arrests in 2014, also shadows any conversation about Venice’s appetite for another mega-project.
How high, how fast
A study published in the journal Remote Sensing offers the most detailed picture yet of what Venice faces. Researchers combined GNSS positioning data, synthetic aperture radar measurements, tide gauge records stretching back more than a century, LiDAR-derived surface models, and climate projections from the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report to map relative sea level rise scenarios for the lagoon at three time slices: 2050, 2100, and 2150.
The word “relative” matters. Venice is not only contending with oceans that are rising; the land beneath it is also sinking. The combination means the city experiences sea level rise faster than global averages suggest. Under higher-emissions pathways, the study’s maps show large portions of the lagoon’s inhabited islands spending significantly more time underwater by the end of this century, with conditions worsening sharply by 2150.
A separate peer-reviewed comparative analysis published in Scientific Reports examines the full menu of long-term options: continuing with movable barriers, building permanent dikes, closing the lagoon entirely, or relocating the city’s population and cultural heritage. The study frames each option against rising-sea thresholds and reaches a sobering set of conclusions about when certain strategies stop working. Every defense has a ceiling. The question is which ceiling Venice will hit first.
The gaps that remain
For all its elegance on paper, the uplift proposal carries significant unknowns. Real geology is messier than any simulation. Whether the lagoon’s actual subsurface formations would respond as uniformly as Teatini’s model predicts is an open question that only site-specific drilling and monitoring could answer. Induced seismicity, a well-documented risk of underground fluid injection in settings such as wastewater disposal in Oklahoma, is not addressed in the published model’s scope.
Cost estimates for subsurface uplift do not appear in the peer-reviewed literature. The Italian government has quantified MOSE’s benefits in avoided damage, but no comparable institutional assessment weighs the long-run economics of raising the city against maintaining barriers, sealing the lagoon, or managed retreat. Without those numbers, decision-makers have no way to compare options on equal footing.
Political will is another blank. As of May 2026, no on-the-record statement from Venice’s municipal government or the Veneto regional authority endorses or rejects the uplift concept. UNESCO, which has repeatedly flagged climate threats to Venice’s World Heritage status and in 2023 considered placing the city on its “in danger” list, has not publicly weighed in on subsurface injection either. The gap between what scientists have modeled and what officials are willing to discuss remains wide.
What Venice’s choices look like from here
Read together, the research paints a picture of a city entering a new phase. MOSE has proven that large-scale engineering can buy time and prevent immediate disaster. The uplift model suggests that even the ground beneath Venice could, in theory, be engineered to keep pace with the sea. But the long-range projections and adaptation analyses make clear that every option has limits, trade-offs, and uncertainties that no single study resolves.
The roughly 50,000 people who still live in the historic center, a population that has fallen by more than two-thirds since the 1950s, are not abstractions in a climate model. They are shopkeepers who stack sandbags in November, students who commute by vaporetto, and elderly residents whose families have weathered acqua alta for generations. For them, the question is not academic. It is whether the city they know will still be livable in 30 years, and whether anyone with the authority to act is willing to consider solutions as unconventional as the problem demands.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
