Netherlands Working On Upgrade To North Sea Dikes To Withstand 10,000-Year Flood
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Rising up in a thin line through the waters separating the provinces of North Holland and Friesland, the 87-year-old Afsluitdijk is one of the low-lying Netherlands’ key defenses against its ancient enemy, the sea. With climate change bringing more powerful storms and rising sea levels , the dike is getting a major makeover.
The Dutch government has embarked on a future-proofing project to beef up the iconic 32-kilometer (20-mile) dam. Work is already underway and is expected to continue until 2023. Just what the Afsluitdijk and the rest of the world’s coastal regions will have to endure in the coming decades will be outlined this week in a new United Nations scientific report on the impact of climate change on ice and oceans.
The Dutch, whose low-lying country is crisscrossed by rivers and bordered by the sea, have been battling with water for centuries. That challenge will only grow as warmer temperatures cause sea levels to rise. With that in mind, the government this year established a “knowledge program on rising sea levels” that aims to feed expertise into the country’s ongoing program of building and maintaining its water defenses.
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The cutting edge of the design work for the strengthening is not being done at a beach or estuary, but in a long wave tank known as the flume in an industrial area of Delft, the historic city best known for its delicate blue and white china and painter Johannes Vermeer. Engineers built a scale model of a cross section of the Afsluitdijk in the tank and are pounding it with waves that they say should occur only once every 10,000 years. The goal is to make sure the new design can survive the destructive power of such a storm. Mark Klein Breteler, a dike expert and project manager at Deltares, the water research center that built and uses the flume, said the new design of the Afsluitdijk needs to handle everything that climate change throws at it. “We know about sea level rise but also the storminess of this area is increasing, so wind speeds are higher and we get larger waves,” he said.
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https://www.apnews.com/4758c0d3504d44079a0e5a58c11cf1a6