IJsselmeer

Geschiedenis

The IJsselmeer, is a closed off inland bay in the central Netherlands bordering the provinces of Flevoland, North Holland and Friesland. It measures 1100 km² with an average depth of 5.5 m. The river IJssel flows into the IJsselmeer.The first two letters of the name are capitalized because IJ is a digraph or even a ligature in Dutch, so it is treated as a single letter (Dutch is the only language having an initial consisting of two letters).HistoryTwo thousand years ago Pomponius Mela, a Roman geographer, mentioned a complex of lakes at the current location of the IJsselmeer. He called it Lacus Flevo. Over the centuries, the lake banks crumbled away due to flooding and wave action and the lake grew considerably. During the 12th and 13th centuries, storm surges and rising sea levels flooded large areas of land between the lake and the North Sea, turning the lake into a bay of the North Sea, called the Zuiderzee. The Zuiderzee continued to be a threat to the Dutch, especially when northwesterly storms funnel North Sea waters towards the English Channel, creating very high tides along the Dutch coast. During the 17th century, Zuiderzee dikes collapsed several times and plans were drawn up to eliminate the threat by draining the bay. Later drainage plans focused on creating fertile farmland. But it never got beyond the planning stage. Only after the flood of 1916, Dutch parliament approved the Zuiderzee Works, a major hydraulic engineering project that involved building dikes, draining parts of the Zuiderzee and constructing the Afsluitdijk to keep tides and high water out.