i am really surprised on what techniques and materials did they use to actively dry out parts of the ocean, they started in the middle ages and continued for centuries, and now it is almost 25% of their landmass.
In: Engineering
People have been drying out wetlands for a couple of thousand of years, the Renaissance machines just made it more efficient. You stake out a piece of land/shallow water, typically with logs/planks, then you empty out the water inside with buckets, powered by people, archimedes’ screw or later pumps, powered by whatever mechanical energy you have around, people, animals, windmills, etc. Then you make sure it doesn’t get flooded again by building dykes, dams and other structures to modify water flows
Build a dike around the area you want to dry up. Install a pump (back then usually a windmill) and pump the water out until it’s dry.
Calling it ‘ocean’ is rather misleading. In the middle ages they were just drying out walkable wetlands. This gradually evolved to shallow lakes and coastal area’s, but those can hardly be considered full sea.
Even the poldering of the Zuiderzee in the 1950’s, which was a very ambitious project with the most modern techniques at the time, happened in a sea that was ‘only’ 2-4 meters deep.
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