11 new islands have emerged in Denmark:

06 march 2019

The Danish Ministry of Environment and Food has announced that since 2015, 11 new small islands have been created in Denmark.

The Danish landscape is a relic of the Ice Age, furnished with sand and clay materials, that get pushed around by ocean currents and deposited along the coast. When enough material is collected in one place, a shallow island appears and can over time grow in size, creating ideal breeding grounds for birds due to their isolated location.

The biggest of the new islands, consisting of 36 hectares of mostly sand, is found near Sækkesand, north of the island of Møn, and is already inhabited by the rare Caspian tern and other sea and wading birds.

The birds, however, should not get too comfortable as these islands might be swept away by a large storm or slowly eroded over time. This is part of the natural dynamic nature of the coastal zone.

Satellite-based monitoring of the dynamic coastal zone is one of our core competences, and with data from the Sentinel satellites we can map these changes in detail on a large scale.

The video below documents the development of the new island between 2015 and 2018 - another great example of the usefulness of the free and open Copernicus data.

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