The anniversary of a historic Danish flood provokes a journey into history, maps, climate and the future
Humanity has long struggled with the question of how much it is master or subject of the elements. In countries with long coastlines in particular, the thought has historically been unavoidable.
Denmark is such a country. It was a Danish King of England who famously tried, and failed, to turn back the waves with his royal power. More recently, too, Danes have acted as if they believe that they are in charge. In an article for the Danish newspaper Information journalist Johanne Pontoppidan Tuxen notes that, even with climate change, most coastal towns have plans to build in flood-prone areas.
In a covering piece for an extraordinary four-part series of reportage articles about the catastrophic storm surge of 1825, Tuxen urges Danes to think again. Two hundred years ago, a single storm cut this part of Jutland off from the rest of Europe, turning seaside dwellers into climate refugees, and leaving what had once been villages deep in the sea. It is a reminder. “In Denmark”, she writes, “we live on borrowed land”.
Tuxen has long lived with this as something obvious to her, even familial: looking at historic maps, and seeing how they have change over time. Her great-grandfather x4, the cartographer, cleric and renaissance man Erik Pontoppidan, published Denmark’s first multi-volume atlas some two-hundred-and-fifty years ago. “In my family”, she notes in one of the longer articles accompanying her op-ed, “the original edition of Den Danske Atlas has been passed down from father to son till its resting place now on a shelving unit at my grandparents’.”
Up until the nineteenth century, those who lived by the sea at the Limfjord planted the dunes to try and provide a modicum of protection, but they also learned to live flexibly with the one constant the sea always brought to them: change. Things are very different now, with water flows engineered and re-directed and canalised: “the landscape that you see today when you look out from the top of the dunes is secured with concrete blocks”. It gives, perhaps, an impression that nature itself has been tamed.
Yet, as Tuxen notes, “the balance of power between humans and nature is being renegotiated”.
Translator is reading on – and suggests you do too.
[PS. If you like this article, you might also like The Promised Land (released as Bastarden in Danish) a largely fictional film with some basis in history, in which a handsomely gnarled eighteenth century Danish army Captain, played by Mads Mikkelsen, struggles with the elements of Danish heathland to grow potatoes from the New World.]
The full original covering article by Johanne Pontoppidan Tuxen was published in Danish on 3 March 2025, available here: ‘Vi har altid levet i en risikoegn, men erfaringerne har vi glemt’, Dagbladet Information.
The longer reportage on the February flood of 1825 was serialised in four parts between 3 and 26 February 2025, with photographs by Anders Rye Skjold Jensen. It is available here, here, here, and here.
Established by the Danish resistance movement in 1943, Dagbladet Information is one of Denmark’s youngest daily newspapers. It appears six times a week, Monday through Saturday.
Johanne Pontoppidan Tuxen is Dagbladet Information’s editor for special issues.
