What are China's motivations to create artificial islands?

China is creating artificial islands to reclaim what they say they have ancestral rights to. AND so they can observe physics at work! They are observing a combination of both mechanical, electrical, and chemical systems at work. How do ships dredge up land mass from the ocean floor? How do you suck up sand from the ocean floor to create island shelves to build structures on? What are the technological necessities? China is answering all of these questions through the application of physics.

Oversimplified, dredging up sand utilizes Newton's Laws and kinematics. Newton's second law states that F=ma, the force is equal to the mass times acceleration of the object. For China to dredge up sand most efficiently, their dredgers shouldn't move in the ocean and be stationary. To do so, they place an anchor into the water, which makes it a fixed point that has a moment, and an x and y component of force. All the forces in the diagram to the right should sum up and be close to zero so that the dredges remain stationary and be still. 


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China also has to be careful of kinematics! How far can they go out into ocean, and still be able to spray the sand onto the shore? This must be analyzed with kinematics. They must understand the velocity at which they can pump out sand and the angle to maximize the horizontal distance. The velocity at which the dredged sand comes out will affect the distance they can be anchored out. By splitting it into the component velocities, the distance d can be solved.