Angel of the west

In the course of reading about water problems in Mexico City at reference 1, I was struck by the ugliness of a flashy golden statue of a near naked lady. Or to be more precise, a 7 metre bronze statue plated with 24 carat gold, a statue which fell off its perch during an earthquake in 1957. I know now that she is a version of Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, a lady celebrated, it seems, by statues more or less like this one all over the western world. I wonder now whether her ugliness is, in part, the result of the sculpture attempting to make her look good from ground level, an attempt which may well involve some distortion. A problem that the Greeks knew all about.

In any event, a sort of Mexican version of our Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square, and you can read all about it at reference 2.

While back at reference 1, it seems that Mexico City, mainly built on the bed of what was a shallow lake at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, is set to run out of water. Rainfall is falling, the aquifer from which they take their water is falling, and the city itself is slowly sinking: 10 metres in the last hundred years and maybe another 30 metres to go. Furthermore, despite the total amount of rain falling, the number of violent rain storms is increasing, with increased risk of flooding and landslides. The Mexicans are responding with various wheezes like capturing the rain water falling on roofs and planting trees on the surrounding hills, but it does not strike me that they add up to anything like enough. The city will have serious problems in years to come.

PS 1: the graphic about the violent rain storms was poorly labelled. Apart from showing a cyclical, upward trend, no idea what it was about. A picture which was not worth a thousand words. On the other hand, if one wanted to draw one's own graph, it was very easy to get at the data on which it was based.

PS 2: any offers on what the black pegs running along the tops of the wings are? Something to keep the pigeons off? Something to do with the lightning which looks imminent in the snap above?

References

Reference 1: Climate change is helping sink Mexico City: The city's residents are navigating changes in rainfall, a shrinking aquifer, and entrenched inequity in water access - Lucas Laursen, MIT Technology Review - 2021.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_Independence.