[vidroll id=”theinertia_lg_yt”]//https://youtu.be/2MOzu6WA7IU[/vidroll]
A few days ago, scientists in the Netherlands made history. In a massive concrete tank called the Delta Flume, they created the world’s biggest man-made wave–just over 5 meters, or 15 feet. And the video they made to showcase it is just terrible.
Delta Flume cost 26 million euros to build, and took over two years. It pumps water in at an astonishing 1,000 liters a minute, and holds over 9 million. Operators can make adjustments that simulate everything from small, choppy surface conditions to one single massive wave. But they couldn’t get a decent camera to film the damn thing operating. To be fair, the scientists probably don’t care much about showing what they did to everyone else. They probably just want the results, which they got. But how much better would it be if they had filmed from the other side, or stuck a person in there, just for scale? They did, after all, make history.
The tsunami surge is made by a steel wall that’s just over 30 feet high, pushing the water back and forth–essentially simulating the same conditions that cause a tsunami in nature. The waves they make flow along a 300 meter holding tank of sorts, at the end of which researchers put things in the way, just to see what will happen, sort of like you did when you were six at the beach. Only instead of building sand walls with G.I. Joe characters in them and pretending they’re drowning, they’re putting stuff like dams in the way, just to be sure they’ll stand up to the real thing.
According to the researchers, floods and tsunami defense simulations need to be done at full scale. “Certain things we cannot make smaller, certain things we want to model at full-scale,” said Dr Bas Hofland, a coastal engineer. “Grass on a dyke, or clay, or sands – they are things you cannot scale down because the properties change.”
Back in the early ’50s, the Netherlands was devastated by a storm surge from the North Sea. Almost 2,000 people died when more 1,500 square km flooded. And now, with climate change and rising sea levels an undeniable fact, the Netherlands is preparing for what might be a grim future.
According to one study by the National Academy of Sciences, in a worst case scenario upwards of 6 million people could be affected, costing somewhere in the vicinity of $100 trillion (with a T).
