d s
ote:
:piece
lbert.
pidly, but perfectly useless against sea level rise, which doesn't go away until the next ice age kicks in,
The Netherlands is essentially the delta of the Rhine, and there there's a thick layer of alluvial deposit under the entire country, which does seem t o include several layers of impermeable clay.
Even the most intellectually undemanding accounts of Dutch land-management talk about pumping water out of the drained ares - it used to be done by wi ndmills but they've long since been replaced by more conventional and somew hat larger pumping stations.
Florida does have some of them, but the thrust of the New Yorker article wa s that there aren't nearly enough to let any significant area stay dry if b elow sea level, and that - given the porosity of the Florida geology - inst alling enough pumps would be somewhere between financially difficult and im possibly expensive.
Large chunks of the eastern side of the Netherlands has been lower than sea level for some hundreds of years, so they can cope with what whatever leak age there is (as well as rain and river-water).