Plausibility on ancient Land reclamation

WarEnsemble

Banned
What we need to remember about Iceland and Greenlnad are that it's "newly" colonised land by the local flora and fauna. Scandinavia and Canada are too, but these was connected to areas which had similar climate under the Ice Age, so it was easy for the local flora and fauna to migrate to these areas. Iceland on the other hand could only be colonised by species which could cross the sea. This have left Iceland with very little biodiversity. Honestly I think if beavers somehow had made it to Iceland after the Ice Age, the island would look radical different today.

It would probably sound ASB, but did people back in the day introduced beavers in new lands?
 
What about the Chinese. They've always done land engineering in the Yellow River and that river always changes course, the region is also under sea level where the river ends
Are you sure they practised land reclamation alá Holland near the deltas? I am under the impression that the deltas slowly expanded into the sea because of all the soil the Yanghze and Yellow river transport.

Concerning land engineering further upstream: China had and always had a giant population compared with other states on earth; certainly compared to Iceland. Iceland doesn't have the man power to pull this off ... and no such rivers either.
 
It would probably sound ASB, but did people back in the day introduced beavers in new lands?

No they didn't, beavers wasn't as such seen as vermin, they was instead hunted to extinction in areas with humans for meat and pelts. As such it's not impossible that someone decided to introduce them for future hunting. Some people did so with rabbits, which was introduced in UK for hunting.
 
Even if reclaiming is possible it seems unlikely that there would be much use for it so far as population density is concerned unless you are able to identify as easy site where large amounts of land for farming could be obtained as opposed to say building out a town
 
Of course some improvement could be made. The Icelandic forest was birch forest, the introduction of pine trees and other subarctic and alpine trees and plants could potential have increase the size of the forests, at the very least it could have improved the biodiversity.
the problem for the trees is the regular volcanic eruptions, and thus acid rain and other pollutants.

Don't places like Japan and the Mediterranean have done reclamation but are sitting on fault lines? I know Volcanoes are rampant in Iceland, but are they a threat to land reclaiming?
soil liquefaction could be a threat
 
the problem for the trees is the regular volcanic eruptions, and thus acid rain and other pollutants.

There was historical forests on Iceland and some still exist

forestry_in_a_treeless_land_kort.JPG


Very light green shows the lightly forested area when the Norse arrives
Light green show the heavy forested areas.
Dark green show the few remnant forests today.
 

WarEnsemble

Banned
soil liquefaction could be a threat

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what would soil liquefaction should land reclamation happen in an area susceptible to earthquakes? Does it slide the land into the ocean or does it turn into some giant quicksand soup?
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what would soil liquefaction should land reclamation happen in an area susceptible to earthquakes? Does it slide the land into the ocean or does it turn into some giant quicksand soup?
it makes the land unstable, thus the buildings on it collapse.
If the reclaimed land is at sea & near sealevel, the dikes around it could collapse and in worst case the the liquefied soil could start sliding into the sea.
what it does is indeed turn the soil temporarily into some quicksand soup, and something like that would try to flow to the lowest point, which near the water would be into the sea
 
... my primary question I should've stated in the OP is how far can land reclamation go? Can it go far beyond miles? I have never understood how the seafloor works with new land being added in reclamation, and I'm not sure how to tackle this if I have to make a map or something to outline this.

I could probably buy some land reclamation, but not on the order of miles. I suspect that Iceland shoals as swiftly as other volcanic islands. You might want to get a nautical chart of Reykjavik or something.

Why do you need land reclamation? Iceland has farms. Very productive ones in fact.
 
In the Newfoundland outports, tiny fishing villages perched on rock, people created soil for gardening by laying down seaweed and fishguts and letting them rot. Over the centuries, they got enough soil to grow potatoes, say.

I don't know if that's what you had in mind or not.

Remember that Iceland is a pretty cold place (in terms of high temperatures, at least) and it's a pretty bad climate for growing crops. One line Dad heard was "good agricultural land in Iceland is where the grass is thick enough to raise cattle". Even during the Mediæval Warm Period, they only grew enough barley for their beer (and since they did eat some, they had to import that). At that time in Iceland grain was the same price as meat, and that's got to be the only place in Europe where that was the case.
 
That's the problem with Iceland, the Little Ice Age will come and make life quite miserable, although with better land practices it might be slightly less so. Same thing with you settle it in Antiquity, since the climate was much colder during Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages.
 
I'm doing a timeline where people colonize Iceland, talking probably Classical or Ancient, maybe the Celts do it. I've tried to study much of Iceland and it's climate, but it looks like inner Iceland looks inhospitable, with all of the glaciers, tundra, and volcanoes. One of the things that got me thinking was land reclamation, I don't really know much about it, but I've been wondering if Pre-Modern Land reclamation can be plausible, specifically on Iceland. I've also been wondering if it brings any benefits such as agriculture and such to make conditions in the coast more livable since going into the highlands is near impossible. Another thing that I was thinking for the Celts living there was crannogs, if the Celts used them, could they be used as a mean to reclaim land from seas?

Correct me if Im wrong on any of this, but I was thinking of this in this timeline and was wondering the options.

Iceland's desolation is mostly manmade.

Iceland is a volcanic island situated on a hotspot on the North America-Eurasia boundary; it's made up of mostly the material produced by its stratovolcanoes...and much of that, is ash. Eons upon eons of tiny, white, fluffy ash comprised much of Iceland's soils, which in turn provided the nutrients for plants leading all the way up to trees which later came to dominate.

Enter Norse settlers, who saw this lush abundance and a-went to choppin'. Unfortunately once Iceland's inland regions got to the point where they supported vast forests, the root systems of those trees and the plants that depended on them were the primary means of keeping that soil intact. Once those were gone, it was up to the wind and storms to blow all that soil away like a ripe dandelion. Luckily the Icelanders eventually started to realize the fragility of their ecosystem and adopted practices that tried to preserve both it and them. Today there are restoration projects in place but I don't remember how intensive they are.

Your Celtic settlers might 'repeat' this mistake if their population density is high enough. Even if they're the stereotypical 'tree cult' at first a culture can always change. All depends on how you write it.

But there are historical examples of preindustrial land reclamation, that is beyond irrigation projects which were nearly widespread. The two that immediately come to the top of my head are the Aztec chinampa plots and the Irish Aran Islands, whose inhabitants used sand and seaweed in stone-bordered plots to turn rocky islands into fertile soil capable of supporting crops and grazing.

Speaking of the Aran Islands, check out this post I and a few others made about terraforming the Kerguelen Islands a while back.
 
Top