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Denmark Parliament Approves Giant Artificial Island Off Copenhagen 58

Plans for an artificial island to house 35,000 people and protect the port of Copenhagen from rising sea levels have been approved by Danish MPs. The BBC reports: The giant island, named Lynetteholm, would be connected to the mainland via a ring road, tunnels and a metro line. The approval by Denmark's parliament paves the way for the 1 sq mile (2.6 sq km) project to begin later this year. But it faces opposition from environmentalists who have concerns over the impact of its construction.

Plans for Lynetteholm include a dam system around its perimeter, with the aim of protecting the harbour from rising sea levels and storm surges. If construction goes ahead as planned, the majority of the foundations for the island off Denmark's capital should be in place by 2035, with an aim to fully complete the project by 2070.
Some of the environmental concerns include the transportation of materials by road, which will involve large numbers of vehicles to move the 80 million tons of soil required to create the peninsula alone. "There are also concerns among environmentalists about the movement of sediment at sea and the possible impact on ecosystems and water quality," the report adds.
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Denmark Parliament Approves Giant Artificial Island Off Copenhagen

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    ..and why does she get an island named after her, and why does she want it to be her home?
    • Re:Who's Lynette (Score:5, Informative)

      by benjymouse ( 756774 ) on Saturday June 05, 2021 @09:36AM (#61456916)

      The name is taken from the 19th century sea fortress adjacent to the planned island. That name is in turn derived from french "lunette" - meaning "half moon" - presumably because of the defensive shape of the fortress.

      • And "holm" in Danish is a suffix roughly denoting "small or low lying island." Other examples from the Copenhagen area are Gammelholm, Slotsholm, Holmen, etc. The other common Danish word for island is "ø" (e.g. Refshaleøen). Note that the "en" in some of those names is how Danish handles direct articles. "The island" is "øen" as opposed to "an island" which is "en ø."

        So the developers could have chosen "Lynetteøen" if they had really wanted to. But it sounds stupid and probabl

  • by lessSockMorePuppet ( 6778792 ) on Saturday June 05, 2021 @09:12AM (#61456870) Homepage

    Pump it off the seabed. They're really good at this. They've got the specialized equipment. They're just a construction company, but at least they've done this..

    • they could stick an outboard motor on it and travel the seas
    • by m1970 ( 8182670 )
      The port of was extended with 2000 hectares of reclaimed land this way between 2008 and 2013. I wonder why this project will take this long?
      • by m1970 ( 8182670 )
        Rotterdam
      • So, 2000 ha took about 5 years to build. Call it 400 ha/ yr.

        2.6 sq.km is 2600 ha, projected to take about 35 year, some 74 ha/yr. And that is after building "foundations" for 15 years.

        Obviously they're using different techniques, which TFS doesn't detail.

        There are things that don't scale terribly well - getting the made land to stop moving and de-watering for one. I guess they've realised that they can't speed these things up. Or they've got a non-engineering constraint, maybe in the financials. Already

    • Pump it off the seabed. They're really good at this. They've got the specialized equipment. They're just a construction company, but at least they've done this..

      Civil engineering is more complicated than that. You need to know what the seabed is made of before you can consider if it is capable to be pumped around. And when you dig into the details you'll see that no, the Dutch don't just pump it off the seabed. In fact there are a few large lakes in the Netherlands that exist precisely because the sand on the seabed wasn't suitable for the specific construction. E.g. Massvlakte construction resulted in the creation of the Oostvoorne Meer since the seabed was too so

    • Naah, they can just reopen the quarries in the Danish Alps, there's enough stone there to build not only Lynettes Island but also a bridge across the Denmark Straight to Stockholm, cutting hours off the current route which goes via Malmo and Bredviken.
      • You should probably take a look on a map of the area, before posting.

        The Denmark Straight is between Greenland and Iceland.
        The only Danish Alps I know about is in Nebraska.

        This new island is in Oresund between Denmark and the west coast of Sweden. Stockholm is on the east side of Sweden.

  • ...that Dr Evil is moving his secret lair from Seattle to Lynetteholm? It'll be super modern & swish... & possibly brutalist architecture? I bet he'll also pay for all his evil henchmen's relocation, language training, international schools, etc.. Ah, Dr Evil. He's a model employer compared to today's corporations.
    • It won't be zoned for lairs, only residential. So the henchmen can be housed there, but the lair will need to be somewhere else.

      • It will be high-rise high-density housing.

        1 square mile / 35,000 people works out to 800 square feet (or about 80 square meters) per person. Raw. A significant chunk of that will be "shared" space (roads, shops, schools, probably no airport, but probably a helipad or three, and so on...), which means it will probably be closer to 400 square feet at ground level per person. To get "acceptable" footprints, they're going to have to go up.

        • The numbers are wrong.
          Not yours, but those in the article.

          This "news" is making news every where. The "artwork" of that island can probably house 3000 people. In an environment that looks so artificial that probably no one wants to move there.

          What kind of jobs can you do there?
          a) maintaining the island
          b) remote computer work
          c) nurse (you need a nurse or two with so "few(many?)" people
          d) a doctor
          e) a post delivery man
          f) one or two grocery stores - perhaps a bakery
          g) kindergarden

          And that probably sums it up.

          • The new island will be very close to Copenhagen city centre. Similar real estate goes for 2-3 times the price of other towns.

            • Does not look like that on the "simulation" and it contains two medium sized apartment buildings, with probably roughly 4 stories and 20 - 30 apartments each level.

      • It won't be zoned for lairs, only residential. So the henchmen can be housed there, but the lair will need to be somewhere else.

        It won't be zoned in the American sense, Danes are not total idiots.

        Sure there won't be room for lairs, but shops and busineses sure.

    • Amazing what you can do with only one MILLION dollars [youtube.com]!

  • The Chinese could probably build this in less than a year!
  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday June 05, 2021 @10:16AM (#61457024) Homepage Journal

    They're creating a new neighborhood in a very expensive city to offset the enormous cost of building the kind of tide control gates Venice has.

    That's why 2070 is their "complete by date". Conservative projections show a sea level rise on the order of 0.3 - 1.2 m by then. Sea levels have risen 100 mm since 1990, which is less than 4 inches. That's not enough to *flood* cities, but coastal cities have effectively been built right up to the edge of what was *historically* safe from flooding. They've been experiencing a lot of expensive nibbling at the edges during high water events, and that trend will only accelerate even if the level of rise remains at the lower end of the likely range.

    Boston is about the same size as Copenhagen, and is weighing a flood control system. Boston harbor is protected by a pair of peninsulas jutting into the Gulf of Maine with scattered islands and shoals between them. The proposal is to build a chain of tide gates from island to island spanning the gap that would be raised during flood events. The cost of the project is estimated at twelve billion, and some are arguing that abandoning vulnerable parts of the city might be more economical.

    It's conceivable that Copenhagen, by creating new and highly valuable land, could actually make money on the project. Financially it's a great idea. Environmentally it's painful, because it involves destroying and radically altering marine ecosystems.

    • 0.3m to 1.2m by 2070? You been drinking the kool-aid. Sea level is rising steadily at around 2-3mm/year for the past 200 years. Taking the higher end, we're looking at 0.15m by 2070. There is no evidence that this rate is going to increase significantly in the near future - certainly not by a factor of 8.
      • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

        here is no evidence that this rate is going to increase significantly in the near future - certainly not by a factor of 8.

        Your ignorance of the evidence is not a lack of evidence [nasa.gov].

        If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100 -- enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities, according to the new assessment by Nerem and colleagues from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

        BTW, 65 centimeters is 0.65m for the me

      • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

        0.3m to 1.2m by 2070? You been drinking the kool-aid. Sea level is rising steadily at around 2-3mm/year for the past 200 years.

        It's rising at 4.8mm/year for the last decade [sciencemag.org]... so there's your first impossible doubling accomplished.

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        This is the old cherry-picking the baseline fallacy. Since the rate of sea level rise since 1990 has risen sharply, setting your baseline all the way back 1820 will swamp the dramatic increase of the last two decades with 150 years or so in which sea levels were rising more slowly.

        The resulting figure is not necessarily *wrong*. It's just an irrelevant figure when it comes to predicting the future.

        • Yes, the pre-industrial era is only convenient as a baseline when it fits the narrative. Everyone cherry picks. Everyone.
    • Almost half of humanity lives in coastal cities. Around the world thousands of cities will spend a combined total of tens of trillions of dollars on flood control. If they instead spent that money on green energy projects, they might head off the very floods they are worried about.
  • I can't seem to easily find this information, I read a few translated pages that promised more information only to find the same information repeated, and gave up. How far above current sea level is this island going to be built? How long before it is threatened by rising sea levels itself? Before it's completed?

    • by jlar ( 584848 )

      I can't seem to easily find this information, I read a few translated pages that promised more information only to find the same information repeated, and gave up. How far above current sea level is this island going to be built? How long before it is threatened by rising sea levels itself? Before it's completed?

      Most of Denmark is still rebounding from the last ice age partially offsetting sea level rise. Copenhagen will rise around 12 cm in the next 80 years. But even then it is expected that the sea level will rise around 50 cm in the coming 80 years. But the problem is really that storm surges become worse. And Lynetteholm is actually designed to protect inner Copenhagen against storm surges in the future (it is not a problem now). See the map here:

      https://www.kk.dk/sites/defaul... [www.kk.dk]

      And of course it is itself desi

  • Some of the environmental concerns include the transportation of materials by road, which will involve large numbers of vehicles to move the 80 million tons of soil required to create the peninsula alone. "

    See, here's the rub: you can spend a fortune on roads to move material (or materiel, cf. the US Interstate system). You can pay up in repairs for moving very heavy vehicles over them, or you can split it into lighter loads to lessen your repair bill. If you do that, you pay in increased vehicle and fuel costs.

    Why not link a bunch of dumb cars together to distribute the load, with an engine(s) pulling/pushing them, and maybe put it on rails because durability.

    Well, you just reinvented the railroad. In wartim

    • As far as I understand it will use surplus dirt from construction projects in Copenhagen such as metro lines. This is probably also the reason why it will take so long to build. But this dirt would just have been deposited elsewhere if not used for this.

  • a dam system around its perimeter, with the aim of protecting the harbour from rising sea levels and storm surges.

    Wouldn't this make the island subject to flooding and storm surge? Aren't the developers simply moving the danger point to a new point? How often will the structures on the island need repaired since it's further out in the ocean? Water? Sewer? Food?

  • by Max_W ( 812974 )
    The Kingdow of Denmark is one of the largest countries in the world. It's area is more than 2 million(!) square kilometers. Is not it enough?
  • Would this topic even be here but for environmentalists drumming up attention?

  • Someone's picturesque sea view is going to become obstructed and we can't have that.
    • by Plammox ( 717738 )
      The Øresund sound between Copenhagen and southern Sweden is not very picturesque.There a view of a decommissioned nuclear power plant on the other side. It's arguably the ugliest and most uninteresting stretch of coastline in Denmark.

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