Long-term subsidence study in the Wadden Sea Region

The Wadden Academy established an independent Scientific Steering Committee to review, provide guidance and advise on the outcome of the Long-term subsidence study in the Wadden Sea Region.

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The study is  requested by the Inspector General of Mines and it is carried out by NAM as well as different other parties on behalf of NAM. The purpose of the study is to provide an improved understanding of the subsidence process induced by gas extraction in the Wadden Sea Region. The project started on 1 January 2013 and will run until 1 July 2015.

The first two-day meeting of the Steering Committee was held at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam on the 18th and 19th of April. The first day was devoted to the technical review of the NAM’s research programme on anomalous time-dependent subsidence. Two main recommendations were made by the Steering Committee to improve the NAM’s research programme:

•    Include a clear and concise statement of the problem that will be addressed by the research programme.
•    Broaden the study scope to include a limited number of fully depleted gas fields, with good quality geodetic data, located outside of the Wadden Sea Region. Spatio-temporal analysis of the subsidence process in these fields can help to discriminate the key factors that have lead to anomalous time-dependent subsidence in the Wadden Sea Region.

The second day was devoted to the presentation of the NAM’s research programme to the State Supervision of Mines, Dutch nature conservation organizations and other stakeholders.
The next technical meeting is planned on the 28th and 29th October 2013 with the objective to review the study progress.

Read more:
Members of the Steering Committee
NAM research Program (pdf 1,7 Mb)