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the ocean is getting higher you might be
someone who wants to debate the cause
but there's no denying that the world's
sea levels are getting higher
since 1900 the global sea level has
risen by as much as 21 centimeters and
since just 1993
it's risen by seven and a half
centimeters and many scientists expect
that that rate of rise
is going to accelerate across the course
of the 21st century to the point
where at the end in 2100 we might see a
rise
by as much as 2.7 meters from what we
see today
that might not seem like very much but
the results of that would be
catastrophic for countries across the
world
and perhaps nowhere would end up getting
slammed as hard by poseidon's wrath
as the netherlands which is uniquely
vulnerable to rising sea levels and
always has been
in 325 bce the ancient greek geographer
pythius
said of the netherlands as he was
passing through it that more people here
died in the struggle against water than
in the struggle against
men roughly one-third of the land in the
netherlands is located beneath
sea level and two-thirds of her land is
considered to be extremely vulnerable to
flooding and as a result
the dutch have been fighting a war
against the ocean that threatens them
for
centuries and in the past they've come
up with some pretty ingenious solutions
to fight against their water problem
they've constructed dykes dams
floodgates canals
pumping stations and more all in their
effort to push the sea
back in 1933 the netherlands completed
construction of the offslight dike dam
which separated this historical body of
water known as the zoider z
from the north sea over time the zoider
z became a freshwater lake and the dutch
even managed to drain some of it out to
reveal new lands for settlement
this new land that the dutch managed to
dig up from beneath the waves is roughly
twice the size of singapore and is today
home to over 400
000 people who now call it home without
this complicated system that the dutch
have built over the centuries
the netherlands would naturally look
like this today and
millions of people in buildings would
all be underwater
but the ocean has not entered into its
final form
yet and the biggest challenge that the
netherlands may face from it
is still ahead the current system that
the dutch have built
is up to the standard that a single
flood can be expected in the west of the
country about once every ten thousand
years and in the rest of the country
that's less inhabited about once every
four thousand years
but the current system is not built
according to the worst case projections
for sea level rise by the end of the
21st century
if sea levels do in fact end up rising
up to 2.7 meters higher than what they
are today
this is what the area around the
netherlands will end up looking like
nearly half of the country is going to
be underwater
including her most major and important
cities like amsterdam rotterdam
the hague and utrecht belgium germany
denmark
france and england will all suffer
significant parts of their coastlines
going beneath the waves as well
so in the event that this ends up
happening only a very
radical solution could push the ocean
back and
what better people to come up with that
radical solution
than the dutch who have been fighting
this very war
for centuries enter the proposal made by
a dutch scientist and his german
colleague
dubbed the northern european enclosure
dam or
need for short the proposal calls for
the construction of a series of colossal
dams around the perimeter of the north
sea and the english channel
in order to block the rising sea levels
from getting inside and threatening
northern europe
the shorter of these sections would be
built across the channel from cornwall
in england over to brittany in france
a distance of 161 kilometers across an
average depth of roughly 85 meters
of course to simplify the engineering
challenges and resources required
the dam could be constructed further
back in the channel across the
significantly more
narrow strait of dover but then it'd be
leaving all of the land in southern
england and northern france
vulnerable to the wrathful ocean's waves
the northern part of the structure would
be a collection of island hopping dams
that originates in mainland scotland and
stretches from there out to the orkney
islands
and then from there over to the shetland
islands and then finally from there
it would stretch out 331 kilometers
across the open ocean to western norway
this final section would of course be
the most challenging to accomplish
from an engineering perspective
particularly because the depth across
most of it is
well over 100 meters and once the dam
approaches norway
the depth dramatically increases to well
beyond
300 meters in some places to make
matters even worse
the finishing point for the dam here in
western norway isn't really connected to
the norwegian mainland it's on an island
called satra
so another small series of dams would
have to be constructed from here
over to the norwegian mainland somewhere
in order to completely enclose northern
europe from the rising ocean outside
the paper's authors claimed that the
total cost for this entire project would
be somewhere between the range of 200
billion
and 500 billion euros but they also note
that that would be less than
0.1 percent of all the countries gdps
within the dam who would have their
coastlines devastated
if they chose to do nothing instead if
the need ever does hypothetically get
built in the future
it will give the countries around the
north sea the ability to do something
very interesting they could begin to
artificially control the sea level
inside of the dam which means that if
they lowered it
they could begin to reveal lands that
have been lost to humanity for
thousands of years as recently as just 8
000 years ago
the british islands were actually the
british peninsula
because a huge piece of land existed
where there's now
only water between it and europe this
land is known today as
doggerland and roughly 8 000 years ago
rising sea levels flooded this low
elevated land and submerged it
which separated the higher hills of
britain from the european mainland
if the need was constructed though the
countries around the north sea could
begin to drain water out
and reveal as much of this ancient land
as they want for modern settlement and
colonization
which might actually be vitally
important
good land to resettle the millions of
expected climate refugees from other
less fortunate parts of the world on the
netherlands could expand to become a
super netherlands who doubles triples or
even quadruples her current land size
but the geopolitical consequences of
constructing the need
and draining the water inside should
bear some
dire mention first of all the absolute
shock of connecting britain with europe
via land would almost
certainly deal a huge psychological blow
to a lot of people
britain's whole identity is so wrapped
up into being an island and being
separated from the rest of europe
so actually being connected by a piece
of land to the european union
and the european continent that people
and vehicles could just move freely
across back and forth that couldn't be
protected or defended by the royal navy
would certainly be a problem to a lot of
people i'm sure
i also cannot possibly imagine a
scenario in which russia
would be happy that their baltic sea
fleet and ports would be trapped within
what's essentially a big
bathtub as i've said many times in many
videos in the past
russia's entire identity has been based
around overcoming being effectively
landlocked and their ports on the baltic
sea are one of their only
paths to trade and naval expansion out
towards the larger global ocean
if the need was constructed it would
effectively check
russian naval ambitions and block them
inside of the baltic
leaving only the black sea as russia's
sole year-round
access into the world's oceans so they
wouldn't be happy and neither would
international trade either
if the dams were constructed without any
entrances or exits
then global trade would take a massive
hit out of the top 10
busiest cargo ports in europe seven of
them
would all be located within the confines
of the need rotterdam
antwerp hamburg amsterdam bremerhaven
promorsk
all of these ports combined make the
english channel the single
busiest shipping route anywhere in the
world and the closure of it would almost
certainly
crash the entire european economy so
there's gonna need to be a way to get
these ships out and
back in so that the spice continues to
flow
finally there's also the minor problem
of the north sea
channel and baltic gradually turning
into the world's biggest freshwater sea
water circulation from the outside ocean
would be obviously restricted from
entering whereas freshwater discharge
from rivers like the rhine the muse
the thames and dozens of others would
just keep flowing in
so over time the body of water inside of
the need would gradually turn into fresh
water and who knows what kind of
catastrophic environmental problems
that might end up having in short the
authors of the need paper do not intend
that the construction of the dam
should be the solution to global climate
change rather
they published it as a warning to us all
of the radical solutions the world might
one day require
if we don't fix the problem right now in
the present
perhaps one day in the future we might
end up needing to use the plan and we'll
have to learn the proper engineering
abilities and skills
required to build it by then normally
acquiring new skills requires a lot of
commitment
both in time and money but skillshare
breaks those barriers down
you might not need the skills to build a
dam that'll save the world but you might
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passionate about
want to learn digital illustration i'd
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want to learn how to animate your own
youtube videos just like mine
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thank you for watching