Ride The Wave

At the Deltares Research Institute, just outside the city of Delft in the Netherlands, engineers are carrying out the final tests on their new machine. In a huge concrete tank, colossal wave after colossal wave crashes down with an ear-splitting roar.

This is the Delta Flume, and it can create the largest artificial waves in the world.  The waves are created by a 10m-high steel wall, that pushes the water back and forth. By making adjustments to this movement, waves can be made to order: from the choppy waters of stormy seas to a single tsunami surge.

They then travel along a narrow 300m-long tank. At the end, scientists can place full-scale flood-defense technology, such as dams, dykes and barriers, to see if it can cope with whatever nature can throw at it.

"Certain things we cannot make smaller, certain things we want to model at full-scale," explains Dr Hofland. "Grass on a dyke, or clay, or sands - they are things you cannot scale down because the properties change."

"Yesterday, we had a wave of over 5m, but we're hoping to get some larger ones," the engineer explains.

The new facility cost 26m euros and took two years to build. It holds 9 million liters of water, pumped in from a reservoir at 1,000 liters a second. The Dutch have good reason to be interested in protecting their country from the sea: two-thirds of the land is at risk from flooding.

And they have first-hand experience of the horror that can happen when flood defenses fail.

In the winter of 1953, a high tide and treacherous weather combined to create a devastating storm surge in the North Sea. In the Netherlands, 1,500 sq km of land was flooded, and nearly 2,000 people were killed. In the UK, too, sea walls were breached, and more than 300 lost their lives. The death toll at sea was more than 200.       Read more...