News

A safe and liveable delta, who doesn't go for that? Storm surge barriers play a crucial role in this. Yet there are many choices to be made in the short term to keep the storm surge barriers in a good condition, to eventually cope with rising sea levels in the longer term. A new project receives funding from NWO for five years to explore the best routes to a liveable delta.

Oriol Colomés Gené is awarded a NWO Vidi grant to work on a first digital ocean to assess floating solar farms. The model will enable researchers to study the interactions between the waves, wind and floating solar platforms. Understanding the impact opens doors to work on improving the efficiency of energy production.

Reef-lined islands are often low-lying and thus extremely vulnerable to coastal flooding. The vanishing of coral reefs worldwide gives the waves free rein. Besides efforts to protect the reefs, ways to artificially restore coral reefs are being devised. Can the proposed reef restoration be an effective mitigation measure against flooding?

New findings from a spaceborne monitoring team of University of Houston, TU Delft and DLR indicates the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine may have been already ongoing before the war with Russia, with deformations in the dam pre-dating the actual collapse. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment this month.

High waves startle mangroves for days during an experiment at the Delta wave flume in Delft. Researchers from Deltares and TU Delft keep increasing the force on the trees. They test how strong the mangrove trees are under extreme wave conditions and what contribution they make to water safety.

In Vietnam, the newly established Mangrove Living Lab has been put into operation. Here, ideas for restoring mangrove forests to protect the Mekong Delta from water are being tested. Today Minister Mark Harbers of Infrastructure and Water Management visited the lab, which is a result of years of cooperation in education and research between TU Delft and Thuy Loi University in Hanoi.

Can salt marshes serve as a natural solution for flood protection? Researchers of the project ‘Living Dikes’ transported 62 big blocks of salt marshes, containing soil and vegetation, from the coast of Friesland to the Delta Flume at Deltares. After four weeks of exposure to extreme waves, almost the entire salt marsh is still standing there.