A severe drought that has left half of the European Union and the United Kingdom parched is exposing long-submerged historical artefacts across the continent, from ancient Roman bridge piers to a century-old steamship and woolly mammoth bones.
Satellite imagery from Copernicus captured in early August showed European waterways at historically low levels. In Rome, the receding Tiber revealed the piers of the Bridge of Nero, a structure archaeologists believe dates to 39 AD. In Serbia, the Sava River yielded the 54-metre steam tugboat Slovenian, built in Budapest in 1913 and sunk by a German mine in April 1945 while carrying wounded fighters. Bulgarian researchers uncovered remains of a woolly mammoth, including tusks and a jawbone.
The discoveries come with a warning. Jørgen Hollesen, a senior researcher at Denmark's National Museum who leads the SKJOLD project on protecting heritage sites from climate change, notes that many artefacts survived millennia in waterlogged, oxygen-poor soil — conditions now disappearing as summer drought produces record-low river levels across Europe.