World's Largest Man-Made Waves

Developing Flood-Prevention with the World's Largest Man-Made Waves

The minute-and-a-half-long video is a promotional piece for the Delta Flume, a new Dutch facility created to make the largest man-made waves in the world. Officially inaugurated Monday in the Netherlands, the water-filled trough runs 300 meters long, 9.5 meters high, and 5 meters wide (that’s 984 feet long, 31 feet high, and 16 feet wide), according to Science Now.

It can hold 9 million liters of water, which get pushed and pulled by a hydraulic system on one end of the channel to generate waves that can resemble the rough waves of a stormy sea and or a giant wave from a tsunami. A single wave can reach nearly 15 feet high.

On the other end of the channel is a simulation of a gradually rising coast, where Dutch researchers can test—in full scale—how flood-defense technology like barriers, dams, and dykes will hold up against different wave intensities. “Grass on a dyke, or clay, or sands—they are things you cannot scale down because the properties change,” Bas Hofland, a coastal engineer at the Deltares Research Institute, told the BBC in September.

See Deltares' Delta Flume: world's largest wave generator video

The first experiment, conducted in July, tested the strength of 5,000 Basalton blocks—concrete stones—as cladding for a levee. The new data will be used to better calculate how large blocks should be for the ideal levee (findings will be published later this fall). Here are the waves in action.

The Delta Flume, which took three years to complete, was inspired by 1953 flooding in the Netherlands, during which a storm surge flooded nearly 600 square miles of land, killed roughly 2,000 people, and forced a hundred thousand people to evacuate. (The U.K. was also hit, which led the British to start building storm barriers in the early 1980s.)

That was when the Netherlands really started to get serious about preventing floods. The region has invested heavily in flood defense research and technology, and has often helped guide other countries in dealing with sea-level rise.

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