Eliana's Blog Geol9 SP23

This week we will be addressing coastal hazards, their effect on the Dutch coastline, and what the Netherlands plans to do to mitigate them. The most prominent coastal hazards affecting the 620 miles of the Netherland’s coast are flooding and coastal erosion This is because the Netherlands sits in the delta of the rivers Rhine, Meuse, Scheldt, and Ems along the North Sea coast. This article states that about 26% of the Netherlands’ territory is below mean sea level, which has made approximately 60% of those regions vulnerable to floods from the North Sea, rivers, and lakes. Within these flood-prone areas, 60% of the population (approx. 17 million) and regions that create 60% of the gross domestic product (approx. 800 billion EUR worth) are at risk of facing damages that the floods could bring. Additionally, according to ClimateChangePost , coastal erosion has been estimated to occur over 83 miles, spreading across half of the Dutch coast. These considerable sections of the Netherland’...

Hello everyone! This week we’re covering extreme weather and how it affects the Netherlands. According to The Hague, weather in the Netherlands is hardly ever extreme, but can be unpredictable. The Netherlands gets about 700 millimeters of rainfall a year, and only occasionally sees heavy storms with high winds and hard rain. According to a study on extreme weather in the Netherlands by Menno van Wjik, heavy rainfall in the summer of 2021 primarily affected the provinces of Limburg and Noord-Brabant; although, the heavy rainfall had more severely impacted Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. Due to rainfall from the more heavily impacted countries, the rivers Geul and Gulp flooded, which led to notable damage in over 5 counties in the Netherlands. On top of that, the Maas (Meuse) River’s water level reached a record high but did not flood due to active water management. Wjik’s study say that if the Maas River had flooded, damages would have increased exponentially. Fortunately, there were ...