Land subsidence is a major urban geological hazard at home and abroad. With the accelerating of urbanization in China, the scale of land subsidence is enlarging and the harm is aggravating. On the basis of brief introduction of general situation on land subsidence at home and abroad, the advances in forming causes, harm, mechanism, mathematical simulating, monitoring and control on land subsidence in the World have comprehensively been summarized and the principal research directions about land subsidence in the future, which is land subsidence resulting from urbanization and engineering construction, porous water migrating mechanism, model coupling on groundwater and land subsidence, affecting assessment on ecology-economy-sociaty resulting from land subsidence, optimization design on exploitating and artificial recharge of groundwater, systematic control on land subsidence, high precision monitoring on land deformation, mutual relation between urbanization construction and land subsidence, etc. , have been put forward in this paper.