About a quarter of the Netherlands now sits below sea level, and the obvious explanation is that the sea rose. However, researchers who reconstructed the past thousand years of the Dutch coastal plain concluded the opposite — much of the land came down to meet the water

Say “about quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level” out loud and the picture almost draws itself. Local mean sea level still rose about 0.3 metres in their reconstruction because of background land subsidence. Peat loss pulled the surface down dramatically, leaving much of it below sea level. The study reports that 26% of the Netherlands lies below mean sea level, largely as a result of this. The study estimates that “the peat volume loss was 19.8 km3, which lowered the Dutch coastal plain by 1.9 m on average, bringing most of it below sea level.”