In 2011 the Netherlands dumped twenty one and a half million cubic meters of sand into the sea in one enormous pile, and let wind and tide spread it into new coastline for the next twenty years instead of trucking sand in every few years

In 2011 the Netherlands dumped twenty one and a half million cubic meters of sand into the sea in one enormous pile, and let wind and tide spread it into new coastline for the next twenty years instead of trucking sand in every few years

Between January and October 2011, dredgers pumped 21.5 million cubic metres of sand, drawn from the seabed five to ten kilometres offshore, onto a stretch of coast between Ter Heijde and Kijkduin in South Holland, near The Hague. Instead of spreading it evenly along the beach the way conventional nourishment projects do, engineers piled it into a single hook-shaped peninsula covering about 128 hectares, jutting nearly a kilometre out into the No…