When I google this, it talks about “creating” land. How is that even possible to just create a land on the sea?
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you canmove dirt from one place to another (see palm islands in dubai)
naturally, lava flows from volcanos (under water ones too) can create new land areas
In short, you either take dirt/rock/etc from one place and dump it where you want till it’s above water. Or your build a dam/dike then pump out the water until it’s dry (see Holland).
>How is that even possible to just create a land on the sea?
Bring in rocks and dirt to replace what is washed away through natural erosion. The water comes in with the tides and when it recedes, it takes little bits of soil and stuff back with it. It’s like when they build an overpass on a highway. They just bring in more and more dirt and pack it down until it’s high enough to build a bridge over it.
In many areas along the coastline, the water is fairly shallow for quite a distance into the sea. By shallow, it means less than 25m deep. To reclaim land, what usually happens is that a retaining wall is built to isolate the area to be reclaimed. That wall can be made of iron piles, concrete or even rock and dirt. Once the wall is complete, dirt and rock are carried sometimes by barges and then deposited into that isolated area. Of course quite a lot will be needed so this needs to be excavated usually from nearby hills. This rock and dirt displaces the water and eventually it rises above sea level and new land is created.
Reclaiming land is phenomenally expensive so it is typically only done as a last resort and rarely in huge amounts (except perhaps the Netherlands). It only works if the water is shallow – it is impossible to reclaim land in deep water. So we cannot reclaim land in the middle of the ocean typically where the waters are hundreds or thousands of meters deep.
Hello! speaking while living 5 meter below sealevel in “reclaimed” land.
They build dikes, making it like a huge pond. then pump out the water and voila, land reclaimed.
Obviously, you need to keep pumping out water but in a lesser extend then to empty it in the first place.
The other way is to keep dumping sand and rocks in one place till you get an island.
Watch the videos of the building of the islands off China. They take a shallow place in the ocean and use vessels with pumps to redirect sand and material from point A, and pump it to point B. Yeah, it’s a moist, slushy mess, but given time and enough material, eventually you are pumping this slush on top of a dry spot…and that dry spot gets higher, and wider….creating an island.
It won’t be very stable, and won’t be great to build on, but it does the job for most purposes. It is very expensive, and unreliable (see the Japan airport)…but the value is whatever the people doing it consider worthwhile.
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