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Artificial islands are an ancient invention; Take, for example, the Scottish and Irish crannogs of the early Iron Age, or the “chinampas” built by the ancient Aztecs in the shallow waters of Lake Texcoco (present-day Mexico City).
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Today, synthetic islands are much less unusual and have complex engineering techniques that allow them to serve purposes. Many of them were built for advertising purposes or for luxury homes.
Here are seven artificial islands that bear witness to fashionable engineering, in no particular order.
Palm Jumeirah is a synthetic archipelago in Dubai. Construction began in 2001 and was largely completed in 2006.
Palm Jumeirah is known for its palm tree shape, a design meant to maximize the beachfront area. Most of the residences, hotels and resorts built on the Palm Jumeirah offer views of the Persian Gulf and Dubai’s skyline.
CNES/Wikimedia
The trunk of the palm serves as the main access point and is connected to the mainland by a bridge. The fronds are residential areas with a mix of villas, apartments, and townhouses. The crescent is a large, curving breakwater structure that surrounds the outer edges of the archipelago to protect it against the impact of the sea waves, strong currents, and erosion.
Palm Jumeirah was built by state-owned property developer Nakheel Properties and Dutch dredging company Royal Van Oord through land reclamation. This strategy involves dredging existing bodies of water and filling them with dredged curtains or adding materials such as sand, gravel, soil, or cement. .
Palm Jumeirah is one of three planned Palm Islands, the other two being Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira, whose advance was suspended due to the 2007-2008 currency crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The World is an ambitious commission by Nakheel Properties. It is composed of a set of artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, which look like a map of the world seen from above.
NASA/Wikimedia
To this end, the Dutch dredging companies Royal Van Oord and Boskalis have built around three hundred islands with shapes approximate those of the countries of the world. Construction began in 2003 with sand dredged from Dubai’s coastal waters.
By 2008, about 60 percent of the islands had been sold to personal contractors. The idea of creating luxury homes in each of them, adding high-end residences, hotels, resorts, villas, restaurants, grocery malls, and other grocery shopping areas.
However, due to the currency crisis of 2007-2008 and then the COVID-19 pandemic, the progress of the project slowed down and many islands are still underdeveloped. The Kleindienst group, the current promoter of The World, aims to complete the paintings by 2026.
The Ocean Flower Island (“Haihua” in Chinese) has been dubbed “the Dubai of China”. It is located off the north coast of Danzhou, Hainan, China, an area with tropical weather.
This flower-shaped artificial island is 1. 5 times larger than Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah and, according to some sources, is said to be the largest artificial tourist island in the world.
It consists of 3 independent islands connected via causeways. Completed in 2020, Ocean Flower Island was built over 12 years through land reclamation. Since its opening, it has a major tourist destination, with many hotels and resorts and many types of entertainment establishments. , adding water parks, art galleries, functional venues, hot springs, and more.
Ocean Flower Island welcomed more than 5. 5 million between January 2021 and January 2022.
According to a construction plan published by the Danzhou government in December 2019, Ocean Flower Island can accommodate up to 200,000 inhabitants.
The Pearl is a synthetic island located near the West Bay district in Doha, Qatar. Although seen from above it looks like two pearls, its name refers to the fact that it was built on top of a pearl dive site.
Construction began in 2004, with an initial cost of $2. 5 billion, which later rose to $15 billion. The infrastructure works were completed in 2014, five years after the arrival of the first population on the island.
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The island, built with the improvement of four million meters of land, is divided into 12 districts intended to house more than four thousand people. In addition to residential villas, apartments, and townhouses, the island is home to restaurants and other entertainment facilities. .
The Amwaj Islands are a synthetic archipelago from which 2,798 million square meters of land have been reclaimed from the shallow seas northeast of Muharraq Island.
A broad-crested breakwater reef has been added around the islands due to storms and erosion. The breakwater reef, which consists of 11 breakwaters located 75 meters apart, reduces wave height by up to 60%. Breakwaters are made of sand-filled tubes. and dredged stone through the Dutch company Boskalis Westminster.
Frans Zwart/Flickr
The infrastructure progression included all basic services, roads, vacuum sewers, fiber optic networks (owned by U. S. corporations Cisco Systems and Oracle) and nine bridges connecting the islands of the archipelago. This part of the task was completed in 2005.
Connected to the mainland of Bahrain via a causeway, the Amwaj Islands received their first population in 2006.
Kansai International Airport is built on two artificial islands in the middle of Osaka Bay. Construction began in 1987 in an effort to ease tension at Osaka International Airport, which may not be able to expand because it surrounded buildings in the suburbs of Itami and Toyonaka. (In addition, there is a challenge with aircraft noise pollutants in this area. )
The airport was built with a long and lightweight design to help it withstand the earthquakes and typhoons that occur in this area.
Luke Lai. Flickr
In 1989, a dike was built to protect it from erosion, strong winds, typhoon swells, and large waves. Made of rock and 48,000 tetrahedral concrete blocks, the dike is attached to metal chambers weighing tons. This helped the airport withstand the Kobe earthquake. in 1995 and a few typhoons before Typhoon Jebi broke through its barriers and flooded Terminal 1 in 2018.
The islands on which the airport is built were created through landfills and land reclamation. According to ESA, 3 mountains have been excavated for 21,000,000 square meters of landfill. The amount of soil to be added was decided based on the soil point needed. for the airport and the estimated subsidence for 50 years after its completion.
Drop estimation refers to the amount of expected sagging of a design over a given period of time. In this case, Kansai International Airport was intended to sink 18 feet 8 inches (5. 7 meters), but between its opening in 1994 and 2018, it had sunk 38 feet (11. 5 meters). Engineers are now actively working to reduce the airport’s sinking speed.
Hong Kong International Airport is one of the busiest boarding gates and passenger airports in the world.
Construction of the airport began in 1995 and was completed in 1998. The airport was built on a synthetic island created from two existing natural islands, Chek Lap Kok and Lam Chau. These islands have been flattened and joined together through land reclamation. To do this, engineers recovered about nine square kilometers of seafloor, at a cost of approximately nine billion dollars. (In total, the cost of the airport is estimated at $18 billion. )
J. Aaron Farr/Wikimedia
The reclaimed land represents approximately 75% of the airport’s surface area and, according to some studies, has experienced significant settlement. Soil compaction is an express type of subsidence that refers to the vertical downward movement of the soil due to adjustments in the stresses within the soil. .
In the case of the Hong Kong International Airport, the ground settlement has been associated with landfill materials (decomposed granite, blasted rock, wet sand, and blasted rocks), alluvial sediments (unconsolidated materials deposited where the water stream slows down), and construction.