Dutch consortium to conduct four-year study on effects of sand extraction in North Sea

A consortium of Netherlands-based research institutes and companies will be working on a study covering the ecological optimisation of sand extraction activities in the North Sea, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) said in a recent statement.

The project comes in the wake of various international organisations having noticed that sand stocks are declining worldwide yet more and more sand from the North Sea will be needed to protect the Dutch coastline against a rising sea level, said Karline Soetaert, researcher at the Estuarine and Delta Systems department of NIOZ.

An interdisciplinary team will develop new expertise on the effects of sand extraction through the four-year, €5.1 million (US$5.51 million) project.

Around 12 million to 15 million cubic metres of sand are extracted in the Netherlands every year to protect the country’s coastline, while another 15 million cubic metres are being extracted for roads and general infrastructure.

Dick van Oevelen, a marine biologist at NIOZ, said that sand extraction can also have adverse ecological impacts such as damage to certain forms of marine life. Specifically, extraction can cloud the water so much that it has a negative effect on the growth of algae, the basis of the marine food chain, and its main grazers, zooplankton.

The NIOZ said the habitat of animals can also change due to the grain size of the remaining sand being different while sea currents change because of pits and gullies created on the bottom as a result of extraction.