Comment One of Europe’s worst droughts on record has dried up the continent’s major waterways, exposing remains such as a heavily sunken village and WWII era battleships. This week, low water levels in the Serbian section of the Danube River revealed a graveyard of sunken German warships littered with explosives and ammunition. The ships, which surfaced near the port of Prahovo, were part of a Nazi Black Sea fleet that sank in 1944 while fleeing Soviet forces. More ships are expected to be moored on the river’s sandy banks, loaded with unexploded machinery. A junior Serbian transport minister told local media that there were about 10,000 explosive devices in the water. Other ruins have also appeared in Europe as the waters recede due to drought. In July, an ancient Roman bridge built in the first century BC. was revealed in the Tiber River and in August, a village that had been deliberately flooded in 1963 to build a dam emerged from the Belesar Reservoir in Spain. The village is one of several locations submerged under reservoirs in Spain. A ghost town flooded to build a dam on Spain’s border with Portugal emerged in February, revealing houses with windows and walls still intact. Drought has threatened shipping routes, food supplies and electricity in Europe this summer. European Union researchers said earlier this month that nearly half of the continent is under “alert” conditions, indicating severe drought and a large soil moisture deficit, the Washington Post reported. It is not the first time that most of the sites and relics have been blown out of the water. Nazi ships, for example, also appeared during a heat wave in 2003. However, the severity of this year’s drought has made waterways particularly difficult to navigate, with sunken boats posing a hazard to fishing and shipping vessels that must bypass the boats to pass. Ships now have to cross a 110-yard stretch of the Danube, nearly half the available waterway they once had access to, according to Reuters. Glaciers in Europe are experiencing the most severe 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 dry conditions also gave archaeologists and researchers a rare glimpse into the past and contact with ruins that are usually hard to access. Earlier this week, the relentless heat wave that left the Iberian Peninsula drier than at any time in 1,200 years also exposed dozens of prehistoric stones in a reservoir in central Spain. Drought drained the reservoir to a fraction of its capacity, the Spanish government said, giving archaeologists valuable access to the Guadalperal Dolmen, believed to date from 5000 BC. Known as the ‘Spanish Stonehenge’, in a reference to the prehistoric monument built in what is now England, the stones were first uncovered in the 1920s. The area where they were located was flooded in the 1960s to build a dam, and have since become fully visible only a few times, according to NASA’s 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 remains before they sink again, told Reuters. Matthew Cappucci contributed to this report.
