Meanings of gradual subsidence in английском

Then he went West, and there was a gradual subsidence of whatever personal attraction had existed.

To the north, the south and the east was pastoral and desert quiet; to the west was the gradual subsidence of urban stir.

Uniformitarianism provides the key to his first scientific book (Darwin, 1842) on the formation of coral atolls by gradual subsidence of oceanic islands, long continued.

Gradual subsidence as before.