The floods are going to come, sooner or later. Sea level is rising faster and faster and could rise several meters in the next 80 years if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced rapidly, according to the latest research by UN scientists. What does this mean? That we are going to see how the main cities of the world, including London, New York, Shanghai or Los Angeles, will end up under the waves, while the world would lose 1.79 million square kilometers of land (the size of Libya in Africa ).
Within Europe, the Netherlands is particularly at risk, as one third of the country is already below sea level.
Solutions?
A Dutch scientist, Sjoerd Groeskamp, an oceanographer at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, has proposed building two mega-dams in the North Sea in an attempt to protect 25 million Europeans from this predictable rise in sea levels. The idea is to build a 475-kilometer-long giant dam between Scotland and Norway and an additional roughly 160-kilometer barrier between France and England.
” An increase of 10 meters is expected by the year 2500 , according to the bleakest scenarios,” says Groeskampy. “This dam is therefore a call to do something now about climate change.”
The article, published in the American Journal of Meteorology, suggests that the cost would represent 0.1% of the annual gross national product for 20 years of all the countries that would be protected by the dams (it would add between 250,000 million and 500,000 million euros ). According to Groeskamp, the construction is “technically feasible”, as the depth of the North Sea between France and England has rarely exceeded 100 meters and between Scotland and Norway the average is about 127 meters.
“Currently we can build fixed platforms at depths greater than 500 meters, so such a dam seems feasible,” he said. Of course, it would be a construction of two dams on an unprecedented scale. The North Sea would be enclosed and the Baltic Sea would lose direct access to the rest of the world’s oceans.
Consequences
The result would ultimately be the creation of a huge lake to the south and east of Great Britain, around western Norway, northern France, and would represent the entire coasts of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. , Poland, the Netherlands and Germany. The dam would have consequences for the wildlife of the North Sea, as the tide would disappear from much of the sea, taking with it the transport of sediments and nutrients.
“The sea would eventually turn into a freshwater lake,” Groeskamp said. “That will drastically change the ecosystem and therefore it will also have an impact on the fishing industry.”
However, they warned that the costs and consequences of doing nothing about rising sea levels would be “much higher.”
Looking at the future
The future looks scary. If global average temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, sea levels could rise as much as 77 cm by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC). We must not lose sight of these data, as the limit enshrined in the Paris Agreement is likely to be broken between 2030 and 2052 if global warming continues at its current rate, according to a 2018 IPCC report.
Referencia: Sjoerd Groeskamp, Joakim Kjellsson. The Northern European Enclosure Dam for if climate change mitigation fails . American Journal of Meteorology 2020, https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0145.1 DOI 10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0145.1
