Zuiderzee Works

The Zuiderzee Works is a system of dams, dikes, land reclamation and water drainage works that was the largest hydraulic engineering project undertaken by the Netherlands during the twentieth century. It dammed the Zuiderzee, a large shallow inlet of the North Sea, and reclaimed land in the newly enclosed water using polders, with the twin purposes of improving flood protection and creating new agricultural land. Its scale required a joint venture of several large Dutch dredging contractors, the Maatschappij tot Uitvoering van Zuiderzeewerken, and the American Society of Civil Engineers named the Zuiderzee Works, together with the later Delta Works in the southwest of the Netherlands, among the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.