Extreme heat uncovers lost villages, ancient ruins and shipwrecks
Extreme heat this year has triggered wildfires, drought and melting glaciers. Less expectedly, it’s also revealed some weird and dark things about our past — shipwrecks, corpses, ghost villages, and ancient cities. Here’s a look at some of those discoveries.
Roman remains
Italy’s drought has revealed artifacts from World War II and a glimpse of life under Emperor Nero in the first century.
Months without rain and an earlier-than-usual halt in flows from melting snow in the Alps depleted the Po River — Italy’s longest river — to its lowest level in 70 years. The dried-up riverbed revealed previously hidden WWII-era wreckage such as a German tank and some cargo ships.
In Rome, meanwhile, drought sapped the Tiber River and unveiled a bridge that’s thought to have been built during Emperor Nero’s rule.
Spanish ghost village
A town stuck in the early 1990s has reemerged in Galicia, Spain.
Aceredo, a village near Spain’s border with Portugal, was flooded in 1992 to make room for the Alto Lindoso reservoir. In February — about 30 years later — drought exposed the small town. Soon, tourists began flocking to see a place frozen in time.
Scientists expect Galicia to continue suffering from extreme dry spells. “Rainfall and drought patterns are always more complex, more difficult to predict scientifically,” said Jofre Carnicer, Barcelona, Spain-based climate researcher and an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment.
Grim discoveries
Lake Mead unveils a creepy collection of the desert’s history.
Some U.S. reservoirs that should’ve brimmed with snowmelt in the spring instead have bathtub rings of dry dirt, including Lake Mead. The lake fell this year to a record low.
Lake Mead — the massive reservoir at the iconic Hoover Dam — has shrunk to a fraction of its former self to become a site of ghoulish curiosity.
Visitors have come across everything from sunken boats to dead bodies. “We could find everything from a missing jet ski to more bodies,” said Michael Green, an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “As the water recedes, we will find more.”
The human remains discovered at the site include a body in a barrel, according to the U.S. National Park Service.
Shackleton’s wreckage
Scientific expedition cracked a cold case in Antarctic ice.
On Feb. 25, Antarctic sea ice cover shrank to a satellite-era record low level — which may have helped solve one of the greatest mysteries in maritime history. Around that time, a crew set off on a research vessel from South Africa to the depths of the Weddell Sea, a remote area of the Antarctic coastline, to locate, survey and film the wreckage of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. The exact whereabouts of the famous explorer’s ship was long unknown; it had been trapped and crushed by thick Antarctic sea ice in 1915.
Mesopotamian treasure
A Bronze Age empire’s urban center has reappeared in Iraq. From a dried up area of Iraq’s Mosul reservoir this year, the ruins of an extensive, ancient city surfaced. A team of Kurdish and German archaeologists rushed to investigate the site of Kemune, an ancient city on the Tigris River that flourished under the Mitanni Empire from 1550 to 1350 B.C.
The research team found ceramic vessels reportedly containing more than 100 cuneiform tablets. The discovery could provide more details about the end of the Mitanni period city and the start of Assyrian rule in the region. “It is close to a miracle that cuneiform tablets made of unfired clay survived so many decades under water,” said University of Tübingen Professor Peter Pfälzner, who was part of the rescue excavations at Kemune, in a press release.