Draining the North Sea

[PhilJ W]

Just come across  this >>

http://www.retronaut.com/2013/08/north-sea-drainage-project-to-increase-size-of-europe/

Be interesting if it could have been made to work.

[skipepsi]

Just come across  this >>

http://www.retronaut.com/2013/08/north-sea-drainage-project-to-increase-size-of-europe/

Be interesting if it could have been made to work.

Would certainly have altered the history of the world looking at the date!

[Ozexpatriate]

Bit too late I think. Water levels have been rising in the North Sea for millennia.

 

People lived in the area of the Dogger Bank up to around 5,000 BCE.

 

.

[skipepsi]

I am not sure when the land was  flooded but it would surely have made sense to build dams on the highest ground or the shallows north and south. Could even incorparate hydro electric schemes in the dams........ grow biomass fuel in the new lands......... wake up and smell the coffee.

[Ozexpatriate]

Would certainly have altered the history of the world looking at the date!

Given the return of the Saar in 1935, the re-militarization of the Rhineland (1936), the Anschluss (1938) and annexation of the Sudetenland (1938) this project would have offered a lot of Lebensraum for Herr Hitler - and worse than that, no need for operation Sea Lion - just blitzkrieg as usual per 1939 and 1940.

 

They'd have needed this after all.

 

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

Richard II (Act II, Scene I)

[RJS1977]

Would certainly have altered the history of the world looking at the date!

 

Indeed. We can also be thankful that none of the pre-War attempts to build the Channel Tunnel never succeeded.

[Ozexpatriate]

I am not sure when the land was  flooded

~6,500 BCE.

 

It may well have been the collapse of the pre-historic glacial lake covering central Canada and the upper mid-western US (of which only the Great Lakes remain) and its flood into the Atlantic that flooded the North Sea and made Britain an island.

[skipepsi]

I did imply that but left it alone. Dividing up the new land would have halted work before it ever began

[Flying Pig]

I am not sure when the land was  flooded but it would surely have made sense to build dams on the highest ground or the shallows north and south. Could even incorparate hydro electric schemes in the dams........ grow biomass fuel in the new lands......... wake up and smell the coffee.

 

You can't make hydro schemes with flint and sticks, Mick.  You need

.

[The Stationmaster]

Indeed. We can also be thankful that none of the pre-War attempts to build the Channel Tunnel never succeeded.

A good few tons of amatol and/or TNT would have put it out of action fairly quickly.

[skipepsi]

Watkins plan was stopped by the war office because of the invasion fear.even when the French were our allies.

[PhilJ W]

I noticed that it connects with France by a bridge only, the main connection is with Holland and Belgium. If it had been built as a defence it could have been flooded as the Dutch did.

[Ozexpatriate]

If it had been built as a defence it could have been flooded as the Dutch did.

I don't mean to be glib, but how did that work out?

[cornelius]

Here's another one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

[skipepsi]

Low lying land reclaimed from the sea was reflooded to deny passage to tanks etc leaving only roads and railways concentrating targets in one place. The Germans did the same as they retreated.

[Ozexpatriate]

Low lying land reclaimed from the sea was reflooded to deny passage to tanks etc leaving only roads and railways concentrating targets in one place. The Germans did the same as they retreated.

And in neither case did it stop the passage of a mechanized army. Not the Nazis in 1940 (where the Dutch surrendered in four days and all operations beyond the "New Holland Water Line" ceased after 8 days) nor the Allies in 1944. In 1944, the big rivers and their bridges were the bigger bottlenecks - famously in the Operation Market Garden push through Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem.

 

Conceivably a massive ditch with shallow water - impassible to ships and vehicles alike could be implemented, but by the time of airborne units and long range artillery, such things were as outmoded and ineffective as castle moats. Air power is the determining factor.

[skipepsi]

My reply disappeared in short thousands of Americans died taking a forest due to strategic flooding by the Germans. I am too sleepy to recall with certainty  but Heidleburg was its name I think. 

 

 

Hurtgen thanks google

[Ozexpatriate]

My reply disappeared in short thousands of Americans died taking a forest due to strategic flooding by the Germans. - Hurtgen thanks google

Thanks for to the reference to the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. Casualties were very heavy, but the fighting was in a rugged German forest on the border with Belgium and ended around December 15, 1944, right as the Battle of the Bulge began. The area was a staging area for German forces preparatory to their Ardennes offensive.

 

On February 9, 1945, after the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans did open the floodgates to the Schwammenauel dam a day before the Americans arrived, "flooding the Rur (not Ruhr) Valley and delaying the U.S. advance to the Rhine for two further weeks, until 23 February, when the flood waters had receded." The flooding had no influence on the heavy casualties in the earlier Battle of Hürtgen Forest.

[PhilJ W]

I don't mean to be glib, but how did that work out?

Sorry I got the details wrong, it was the Belgians in WW1. This prevented the Germans from outflanking the Allies left.

[clecklewyke]

In Hull in the 1970s Barbara Castle promised us a Humber Bridge if we elected a Labour MP in a bye-election.

 

One response was a popular folk song, written by a couple of Hull teachers "Don't build a bridge, drain the river".

 

Ian

[Guest CLARENCE]

Recently read two of a trilogy of SF/Fantasy books by Stephen Baxter based around something similar, though this was set in pre-history and had the English Channel closed off by huge dams. Stone Spring, Bronze Summer and Iron Winter were the titles.

Regards, David.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

Bit too late I think. Water levels have been rising in the North Sea for millennia.

 

People lived in the area of the Dogger Bank up to around 5,000 BCE.

 

.

Technically, I suppose the entire North Sea, Channel and Southern Approaches are a vast double Ria, river valley systems now flooded by sea water, where the watershed between the two systems must have been near the narrows of what is now the English Channel, and happened to be low lying enough to be overwhelmed and/or eroded away when sea level rose following the massive warming to the present inter-stadial.

 

All that land will resurface in the next glaciation phase which will lock up vast amounts of water in ice lying on land surfaces. Won't be much immediate use to anyone, probably too cold during the glaciation phase, but when the climate warms up it will likely be habitable before it is once again inundated.

[Xerces Fobe2]

I understand that the found the chain however it was not longer attached to the plug; another great plan thwarted

[skipepsi]

When are we expecting the next ice age anyway? man may well be history before it turns up?

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

We are holding it off thanks to our laudable warming efforts. Check out Milankovitch cycles. As recently as the 1970s all the scientific climatic concern was about the near future return of glaciation. Our understanding isn't complete, but the broad picture is of periods of 100,000 year 'ice advance' periods, with 20,000 year interstadials during which the Earth warms and the ice retreats. The last retreat started circa 20,000 years ago, so guess what is coming?

 

What gets totally ignored in the whole anthropogenic warming debate is that the planetary climate is in an ice age, and actually cooler then the long term norm. Permanent surface ice is a minority condition in the Earth's climatic history. This will persist while the continental land masses are disposed such that there is land or enclosed sea at the poles, the continents well dispersed, and large heat dumps in the form of mountain ranges near or in the Tropics.