Thermaal Bad Nieuweschans

Thermaal Bad Nieuweschans draws chlorurated thermal spring water in Bad Nieuweschans in the Oldambt polder region of Groningen province, close to the German border in the flattest and most remote corner of the Netherlands where the reclaimed agricultural peat landscape stretches to every horizon beneath an enormous North Sea sky, and where the discovery of a geothermal aquifer during natural gas exploration has created the only naturally warm mineral spring in the Netherlands. The Groningen peat fields, historically the region's defining landscape, were cut almost entirely for fuel between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries leaving a flat, empty terrain of drainage channels and reclaimed farmland that has required continuous subsidence management as the underlying peat compresses, and the earthquakes triggered by the extraction of Groningen's vast natural gas reserves since 1963 have added a seismic dimension to the geological instability of this corner of the Netherlands that the thermal spring ironically shares with the same deep formations. The chlorurated waters of Bad Nieuweschans, the only thermal spa in the Dutch lowlands drawing naturally warm mineral water, flow in a border region whose geological fortune, agricultural history, and gas-extraction controversies have given the flat Groningen polder landscape a scientific and political complexity belied by its vast quietness under the North Sea sky.