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One of the worst droughts on record in Europe has dried up the continent’s major waterways and exposed relics like a long-sunken village and WWII-era battleships.
This week, low water levels on the Serbian stretch of the Danube uncovered a graveyard of sunken German warships filled with explosives and ammunition. The ships, which surfaced near the port city of Prahovo, were part of a Nazi Black Sea fleet that sank in 1944 fleeing Soviet forces. More ships are expected to be found in the river’s sandbars, laden with duds.
A junior Serbian transport minister told local media there were around 10,000 explosive devices in the water.
Other ruins have also emerged across Europe as the waters receded in the drought. In July, an ancient Roman bridge built in the first century BC was uncovered in the Tiber River.
The village is one of several places submerged under reservoirs in Spain. A ghost town that had been flooded to build a dam on the Spain-Portugal border emerged in February, revealing houses with windows and walls still intact.
The drought has threatened shipping routes, food supplies and electricity supplies in Europe this summer. European Union researchers said earlier this month nearly half the continent is under “alert” conditions, which indicate severe drought and a large soil moisture deficit, the Washington Post reported.
This isn’t the first time most sites and relics have emerged from the water. The Nazi ships, for example, also appeared during a heat wave in 2003. But the severity of this year’s drought has made navigating the waterways particularly difficult, with the sunken boats posing a hazard to fishing and shipping vessels, who must skirt the wrecks to get through. Ships now have to squeeze through a 110-yard stretch of the Danube, almost half the available waterway they used to have access to, according to Portal.
Glaciers in Europe are experiencing the heaviest melting on record
Officials estimate it will cost about $30 million to remove more than 20 ships, munitions and explosives, the Newswire reported.
But the drought has also given archaeologists and explorers rare glimpses of the past and exposure to ruins that are normally difficult to access.
Earlier this week, the relentless heatwave that has left the Iberian Peninsula drier than it has been in 1,200 years also uncovered dozens of prehistoric stones in a reservoir in central Spain.
The drought has drained the reservoir to a fraction of its capacity, the Spanish government said, giving archaeologists valuable access to the dolmens of Guadalperal, which are believed to date back to 5000 BC, where England is now where the stones were first found uncovered in the 1920s. The area where they stood was flooded in the 1960s to build a dam, and they’ve only been fully visible a few times since, according to NASA Earth Observatory.
“It’s a surprise, it’s a rare opportunity to be able to access it,” archaeologist Enrique Cedillo, who is rushing to examine the relics before they go underground again, told Portal.
Matthew Cappucci contributed to this report.