"The house is settling"--What does this mean?! I live in a basement and need to know if one day I'll wake up all the way underground or if this is just something to tell scared people at night.
by 
wander-er-er the vulcanologist
ANSWERS: 6
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This means the soils under your house are moving. "Settling" is a bit of a misnomer. Ground heave is caused by moisture entering or leaving the soil. Soils that have a high moisture content take up more volume than soils with a lower moisture content. Uneven moisture movement under your house means that some parts of the soil will shrink, some will stay the same, some will swell. This is typically not a problem with houses that have pier-and-beam foundations (like many houses that have basements) as the beams can be jacked up or down to level the house and them supports are placed under the piers to keep the house level. If you have a poured foundation (not usually seen with basements), you're screwed as ground heave will crack the foundation, requiring levelling jacks be placed under the slab (expensive!) and the foundation strung back together using cable stays (a hole is drilled longitudinally through the foundation, a cable is fed through the hole, and the cable is tensioned and capped off to the foundation to hold it together). You won't wake up underground, but your doors may stick or refuse to close all the way.
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It is entirely possible you may wake up in china, or at least with the living room on top of you lol...I have kived in several places tha did indeed settle, each season you could see the foundation was lower...odd but true
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The earth is always moving. Not just in our rotation, but the dirt and everything is always moving, but at an extremely slow rate. Like this, have you ever seen trees on a slope, and they all start leaning? That's the earth moving. It's taken hundreds of years for it to happen, but it does. Now, take your house. It's in the earth and it's a sturdy house. The earth is moving, and it's making the sturdy foundation move, just a little, so it makes strange noises. It's nothing to worry about.
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CannedHam is right about moisture heave. But another possibility that occurs is that when your home is built, the dirt remove has some amount of air mixed into it. This basically makes it fluffy. When they finish digging the hole they use a compactor to force as much of the air back out as they can, but if they do a bad job, that air will work it's way out after your home is finished and the dirt will take up less space underneath the structure, causing it to sink a little. The amount it sinks depends on the amount of air. That's called settling.
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Your house has just given up trying to find Mr or Mrs right, and is now prepared to take whatever it can get -ie you. The noises are just the depressed moans of a house that always thought it could do better.
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The sounds you're hearing described as "the house is settling" aren't really the house settling on its foundation. When foundations settle, you'll know it. Cracked paint and plaster, popped fasteners, and eventually cracking concrete and brick over time. The sounds of a basement at night are mostly thermal sounds. Your house is hotter during the day. Materials expand throughout the day, and contract through the cooling at night. Wood creaks, metal pings, and the thousand other minute noises get amplified in the basement.
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