Alex McColgan

They do this by designing facilities like polders.

Polders are bits of land below sea level that have been reasserted from a body of water.

It's always fully or partially surrounded by an embankment to keep the water out that comes from either the sea or a river.

These polders offer a network of drainage canals and pumps to manage water levels by disposing of excess water and running water back to the sea or river to make sure that the water doesn't run over land.

Polders can be used to protect houses, farms, and factories, and thus are used a lot around the country.

The Netherlands also built dams and utilised sand dunes to create ways to stay dry in their swampy land.

This shows that there are ways in which we can observe nature and live alongside it.

So, the bad news is, behind its ethereal beauty, our moon hides a power that, if just so combined, is set to overwhelm humanity's coastal settlements.

However, there's always a bit of good news too.

as knowledge is a power of its own.

By understanding our plight, we can look for solutions, both among already existing ideas and ways forward that have yet to be discovered.

If we are to endure what is coming, it's high time for us to use our innate creativity and drive to adapt and survive, to work with our planet rather than against it.

With so many asteroids hurtling around the solar system, it's a wonder that Earth only has one moon, because beyond the inner solar system, the gas giants have a lot more, some of which are regular moons, plus a lot of irregular moons.

They are called irregular because their orbits do not follow the orbital plane of the planet, instead following a distant, inclined and eccentric orbit, even sometimes orbiting retrograde to the regular moons.

The main reason for this difference is that irregular moons are mainly captured objects, asteroids that were orbiting the Sun before they approached too close to a planet and got captured by the planet's gravity.

So what about Earth?

Well, I can announce that Earth now has a second moon, called 2020 CD3, but it probably isn't worthwhile trying to spot this one in the sky.

It's tiny, only 2-4 metres across, and also very dark, a type of asteroid known as a C-type, or a carbonaceous asteroid.

These types of asteroids are as dark as wet asphalt.

This moon, like the irregular moons of the outer planets, is a captured asteroid that's been pulled into orbit around the Earth.