Venice Floods: A Very Old Problem Gets A New Twist…

flooding Venice

The annual flooding of Venice is now your fault. Venice has been battling rising water levels since the fifth century. But today, the water seems to be winning.

Several factors, both natural and man-made (none of which have anything to do with rising levels of CO2), cause Venice to flood about 100 times a year (usually from early October until late February) a phenomenon called the Acqua Alta.

Although tides are minuscule in the Mediterranean (the narrow, shallow Adriatic Sea has about a three-foot tidal range), when a storm approaches the city, the wind pulls the surface of the water up into a dome, causing a surging storm tide, which in turn causes flooding in the city.

Yet the mainstream media, who have chronicled many of these floods, as well as published innumerable articles outlining the engineering exploits of the Italian government in their failed attempts to combat the progressive slip of the famous city into its inevitable watery grave beneath the gently lapping waters of the Adriatic, have now jumped on the “Global Warming Bandwagon”… And, “it’s all your fault… Shut up and pay your taxes!”

But what is the true cause of Venice’s slow death?

Founded in 421 AD by a Celtic people known as the Veneti, Venice was the trading hub of the known world for centuries until its demise shortly after the discovery of the Americas and the resulting shift of trade routes to the Atlantic.

Built on top of wooden pylons driven into the silt of a tidal swamp at the mouth of the Po River, subsidence was inevitable. Large heavy stone buildings built on mud, what could go wrong?

The slow-motion sinking of the city was exasperated further in the nineteenth century by many of the early industrial projects that occurred at the time, such as offshore piers and the railroad bridge to the mainland, which all disturbed the seafloor and tidal cycles in ways that made the city more vulnerable to flooding.

Then in the twentieth century, the local industry made things even direr by extracting massive amounts of groundwater from the aquifer beneath the lagoon, a situation that lasted for nearly 50 years before the government stopped the practice in the 1970s, but not before the city had sunk by roughly nine inches.

So yet again we find that the powers that be have an agenda, and it has nothing to do with facts and the truth…

Read more at Electroverse


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Comments (3)

  • Avatar

    ichael Clarke

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    Venice was sinking this was thought to be caused by lowered groundwater levels, they were being drawn off. They stopped that and the rate of sinking slowed.
    The tourist $$$ required that much larger Cruise liners be able to disgorge their $ rich tourists right inside Venice , so the lagoon and entrance to the Grand Canal were dredged.
    Surprise, surprise, the larger aperture gives rise to larger inflow and the sea invades yet again.
    Now consider this:- in many parts of the world excess ground water is managed by digging ditches. Those dredged openings constitute a rather large ditch, a ready path for ground water to drain into. The tide acting rather like a pump alternately flooding Venice as the tide rises, lowering the ground water as the tide falls. Venice will again be sinking more rapidly.
    Add to that the small problem of a SE storm and a spring tide and good-bye Venice.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    jerry krause

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    Hi Folks,

    I read: “Although tides are minuscule in the Mediterranean (the narrow, shallow Adriatic Sea has about a three-foot tidal range), when a storm approaches the city, the wind pulls the surface of the water up into a dome, causing a surging storm tide, which in turn causes flooding in the city.”

    Do words have no meaning (definitions) any more? A tide is the result of a gravitational force. A tide is not caused by weather: a storm. A storm surge is caused by weather: a south wind blowing toward the north. I have seldom, to never, read that a wind pulls. If one stands in a wind it is very obvious that a wind pushes.

    The publisher of Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences wrote, in their preface to the reader (as translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio): “intuitive knowledge keeps pace with accurate definition.”

    I make many mistakes as I write and sometime I have purposely written that which I find to be clearly wrong and I rush to admit and to correct my error.

    Have a good day, Jerry

    Reply

    • Avatar

      WhoKoo

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      Hi Jerry.
      Slipstreaming in cycle races is the nearest thing I can think of that is close to “wind pulling”. Wind effect on water mass is definitely pushing.
      When I set my nets in the shallowest of waters at low tide with an onshore wind (15 knots) and the wind turns offshore over night (15 knots) the low tide difference in a West Coast NZ harbour is approx. .3 to .4 of a meter.
      I note you opened another comment with “Hi Fellows” but I do need to inform you the correct Pidgen English is “yous Fulluhs”.
      Enjoy your day Jerry. WhoKoo.

      Reply

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