Denmark has just finished moving a 130-year-old lighthouse away from the sea that was threatening to wash it away or cover it with sand.
The Rubjerg Knude lighthouse, built originally 200 metres from the ocean has seen the distance between it and the ocean shrink, even as drifting sand poses a threat of its own. By the 1990s, the small museum buildings that sat next to it had to be abandoned as they were covered by sand.
The moving operation involved digging into the sand to lay supports and then rails from the old site to the new, digging beneath the lighthouse’s foundation to place jacks beneath it and then raising it onto the rail platform to be rolled to its new location.
