RP225 Taking Land From the Sea

 RP225 Taking Land From the Sea

I bet you've never thought of the Dutch as mermaids, but it can be said that they live below the sea—well, below sea level, that is. About one quarter of the land of the Netherlands is actually below sea level. The Netherlands boasts the lowest point in Europe. One of its provinces is seven meters below sea level!

People in the Netherlands have been fighting the sea for 2,000 years. The first people to settle in the Netherlands began the tradition by building artificial hills to live on. They called them terpen. Over time, these terpen were connected by dikes—low walls usually made of earth. The dikes connected the terpen into villages and also stopped the flow of the sea and rivers. People began to use dikes to dam larger areas of land. These reclaimed areas were called polders. Water in the polders was drained into the sea or the rivers using windmills. The drained land was often used for farming.

After 1000 A. D., the Dutch population grew and they began to take land reclamation more seriously. Many monasteries helped build large-scale dikes, but the process hasn't always gone smoothly. A storm in 1134 destroyed some land reclamation projects. Then in 1287, a dike broke during another storm, causing a massive flood that killed between 50,000 and 80,000 people and left behind an inland sea in what had been a lake. In 1421, another polder was taken away. The last major flood in the Netherlands was in 1953. After this, the Dutch undertook the Delta Project, which aimed to eliminate the threat from the sea totally.

The dikes and polders are not a perfect system. When land is drained, the peat underneath often compresses, causing the land to sink lower. As the land sinks and the seas and rivers rise, the Dutch are in a position to be seriously affected by climate change. On their side, however, they have the 2,000 years of experience in fighting the sea.