Jordsand is no more. The island in the Wadden Sea was once German then Danish and provided valued summer grazing for livestock from Jutland. Now it has been swallowed by the waves.
Much of the focus of the international debate on climate change and its impact on coastlines relates to the effects of global warming in low latitudes. But Europe is not immune to the effects of rising sea levels. About one quarter of the territory of the Netherlands is below sea level. While geographers ponder the likely fate of tropical islands, tides are taking their toll on some of those islands' European counterparts.
Within historical times, several islands have simply disappeared in the Venetian lagoon. The former island of San Marco in Boccalama once housed a large monastery until the monks could hold back the rising tide no longer. They even sunk two ships to shore up the island's fragile sea defences. After the monks had left, the island found new life as a mass grave for victims of the plague in 1348. But then the waters of the lagoon rolled in and San Marco disappeared in a watery grave.
In 1721, a huge North Sea storm battered the island of Helgoland and effectively divided the island in two. Helgoland’s diminutive neighbour, called Düne, is today uninhabited but curiously does have an airport since there is no space on Helgoland itself for an airstrip. So anyone arriving by plane is instantly reminded that it is the sea that dominates Helgoland life; passengers are transferred by boat from the airport terminal over to Helgoland. This oddball arrangement confers on lonely Düne the status of being the only uninhabited island in Europe with a regular scheduled air service.
The coastline of the eastern North Sea basin has some of the European communities most threatened by the sea. The German island of Sylt has been reshaped by the sea in living memory. Heavy storms in early 2007 caused massive coastal erosion. South of Sylt, in the Wattenmeer (Wadden Sea) area, a number of tiny island communities face annual inundation by high tides. They survive only because their farmhouses are constructed on artificially elevated hills — called terpen. To these elevations humans and their livestock retreat during times of sea flood. Life beyond the safety of the dykes that protect the Jutland coast is often perilous.
Just northeast of Sylt is an island that has recently disappeared entirely beneath the waves. Two hundred years ago, Jordsand covered about forty hectares and early travellers recorded the island’s green meadows, much valued by Jutland farmers who every spring brought their cattle and sheep over to the island for summer grazing. There were several terpen on Jordsand that afforded a safe retreat during floods. From 1864 until after the First World War, Jordsand belonged to Germany and it was here that in 1907 the country’s first bird reserve was established.
The Treaty of Versailles made provision for a new maritime border between Germany and Denmark in the north Wadden Sea area in the early nineteen twenties. At that stage Jordsand was ceded to Denmark and the provisional sea boundary between the two countries included a kink to accommodate Jordsand as part of the Scandinavian country. But ten years ago, Jordsand was finally inundated, a tiny fragment of Europe that disappeared beneath the sea. At low tide, substantial areas of sandbank are exposed to the northeast of Sylt, but no longer can Jordsand be identified as a separate entity. No doubt learned international lawyers are pondering whether the maritime boundary between Germany and Denmark now needs to be redrawn.
Jordsand may have disappeared from maps, but the name survives in the Jordsand Verein, the German association of ornithologists who in 1907 first arranged for the island to secure special status as a bird reserve.
Tags: Denmark, events, Germany, Italy, landscapes
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