GeoCast

The southern tip of Shanghai’s coast, especially around Lingang and Nanhui New City — has gone through one of the largest coastal land reclamation projects on Earth over the last 40 years.

Since the 1980s, Shanghai has added more than 580 square kilometers (220 square miles) of new land by extending seawalls into shallow coastal waters, trapping sediment from the Yangtze River, and dredging massive amounts of sand and mud. NASA describes Shanghai as one of the world’s leading cities for land reclamation.

The biggest transformation happened at the southeastern “nose” or tip of Shanghai’s coastline along Hangzhou Bay. Satellite imagery from the 1980s compared with today shows the coastline pushing dramatically outward into the sea. Entire districts, ports, wetlands, roads, and even an airport expansion were built on land that did not exist a few decades ago.

A centerpiece of this expansion is Dishui Lake, a perfectly circular artificial freshwater lake built between 2003 and 2005. Engineers created it using sediment deposits and reclamation works as the core of the planned city now known as Lingang or Nanhui New City. The city was designed with concentric rings radiating outward from the lake, almost like ripples in water.