A scientist employed by the Dutch government has suggested building two dams to enclose the North Sea and defend northern Europe from rising sea levels.
Called the Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED), the proposal suggests building dams in the English Channel between France and England and between Scotland and Norway.
Spanning 395 miles in total, the pair of concrete dam would require 51 billion tons of sand to build ? the world's entire sand budget for a year.
Dam would cost £422 billion to build
The report was written by Sjoerd Groeskamp, an oceanographer for the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. It estimates that the cost of the 395-mile-long dams would cost ?508 billion (£422 billion).
However, it states that this would be a cost effective way of protecting the 25 million people living in coastal communities in northern Europe who would be affected by rising sea levels.
Groeskamp also created the proposal as a warning to draw attention to the impact rising sea levels could have in Europe.
"Besides being a possible solution, the design of such an extreme dam is mainly a warning," said Groeskamp. "It reveals the immensity of the problem hanging over our heads."
Sea levels have already risen 21 centimetres since the industrial revolution in 1880, and there is a time lag between rising temperatures and sea levels.
Current climate change models predict sea levels will be rising for centuries, well beyond the year 2100. Some models pr...