The greatest drought in Europe in 500 years uncovered German battleships that sank during WWII, as well as a Neolithic stone circle known as Spanish Stonehenge.
Falling water levels exposed a submerged island and three Buddhist sculptures thought to be 600 years old in China, while a drought-ravaged lake in the United States discovered the corpses of five persons believed to have been slaughtered by organised gangs (the mafia).
Drought-related archaeological findings
Countries throughout the world are suffering record-breaking summer heat waves and droughts, which have lowered river levels to dangerously low levels.
Drought has also uncovered the Hunger Stones, a set of boulders carrying the phrase If you see me cry and used by inhabitants to document the population’s drought suffering over the previous century, along the Elbe River, which runs from the Czech Republic to Germany.
The drought also uncovered the hulls of hundreds of German battleships packed with explosives that sunk near the Serbian river port of Prahovo during World War II.
These are among the hundreds of ships from Nazi Germany’s Black Sea Fleet that were deliberately wrecked while retreating from the approaching Soviet forces along the Danube in 1944.
Archaeologists in Spain have been ecstatic over the discovery of a prehistoric stone circle known as Spanish Stonehenge, which is typically submerged by dam water.
The whole ancient stone circle was discovered in one area of the Valdecanas Reservoir in the central province of Caceres, where the water level has dropped to 28 percent of capacity, according to authorities.
Hugo Obermayer, a German archaeologist, found this stone circle in 1926, but it was buried in 1963 as part of an agricultural development project under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.
a bomb scare
Italy, for its part, issued a state of emergency in the Po River basin following the discovery of a submerged World War II bomb weighing 450 kilos in the river’s low levels.
Three Buddhist sculptures, said to be 600 years old, were discovered in the highest area of the island’s reef called Fuiliang, which was first recognised as being created between the Ming and Qing periods. One of the sculptures shows a monk sitting on a lotus blossom.
The finding emerged after the Yangtze River’s water level dropped dramatically owing to a drought and hot wave in southwest China.
Meanwhile, the drought in the United States has resulted in a series of surprising findings. The corpses of five persons thought to have been killed by the mafia have been discovered at the bottom of Las Vegas’s rapidly dwindling Lake Mead.
In May, the corpse of a victim shot in the head was discovered in a barrel before being discarded at sea, eerily similar to the Las Vegas murders of the 1970s and 1980s. Other victims were discovered months later, slain in the same manner.
Global drought uncovered explosives and ancient sites in photographs
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