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In the previous video you already saw that the sea level is rising due to the melting of land ice and the expansion of seawater. This video explains the consequences of sea level rise for northwestern Europe.
First of all, it is important to know that the sea level does not rise equally everywhere.
That has to do with gravity. Every object exerts gravity. The force is only very weak, so we only notice the gravitational force with a huge object, such as people are drawn to the earth.
Mountains and large ice caps are also huge, and exert gravity. A lot of water is therefore attracted to these places. The ocean water is therefore not evenly distributed over the earth. In some places, such as Greenland, the sea level is 80 meters higher than average and in other places, such as India, the sea level is 120 meters lower than average.
When the Greenland ice sheet melts, the sea level rises an average of 7 meters, but the ice sheet itself also disappears. As a result, less water is attracted to Greenland, causing the sea level there to fall.
It is therefore possible that areas close to Greenland, such as Iceland, will be faced with a drop in sea level. For the Netherlands, if the Greenland ice sheet melts, the sea level on the coast will rise by less than 7 meters, because the Netherlands is relatively close to Greenland.
The sea level rise has major consequences for the Netherlands. The Netherlands is very low and parts of the Netherlands are already below sea level.
Moreover, the soil in the Netherlands is also sinking! That has two causes.
In an earlier video you could already see that during ice ages there was a lot of ice in Scandinavia.
This land-ice pressed the continent down, causing Scandinavia to sink. Because there was a kind of see-saw movement, the Netherlands was actually lifted. The ice has long since melted, but Scandinavia is still bouncing back a bit. This means that the Netherlands is moving slightly more downwards due to the see-saw movement. Since this happened after the ice age, it is called post-glacial rebound.
A second reason for the subsidence in the Netherlands is settling, especially in regions with peat soils. The water has been extracted from the soil by digging ditches. As a result, the peat soil sank and the drier peat started to oxidize, causing the soil to sink even further. One solution is to raise the groundwater level, but this severely restricts agriculture and only makes livestock farming possible.
So, not only is the sea level rising, the bottom is also sinking. To explain this difference, we use relative sea level rise. This is the rise in sea level relative to the bottom. Because the Dutch soil is sinking, the relative sea level rise is therefore a lot higher than the rise in seawater alone.
In short: Sea level rise can differ per area. Because the Dutch soil is also subsiding, the rise in sea level can have major consequences.