Rivers are drying up due to a severe drought in Europe, exposing ancient carvings meant to warn future generations of difficult times to come.
Locals claim that the centuries-old rocks, sometimes referred to as “hunger stones,” emerged last week as rivers in Europe dried up owing to drought conditions, according to a report in the Miami Herald.
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On the banks of the Elbe River, which rises in the Czech Republic and runs through Germany, is one such stone.
The German warning is engraved into a boulder that goes back to 1616 and reads, “If you see me, then weep.” According to a Google translation of the sentence.
These rocks are “chiseled with the years of misery and the initials of authors lost to history,” a group of Czech researchers said in a 2013 study, adding that the “basic inscriptions warn of the effects of drought.”
According to academics, the article “stated that drought had led about a disastrous harvest, scarcity of food, high prices, and hunger for impoverished people.” The droughts marked on the stone prior to 1900 include those that occurred in 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, and 1892 and 1893.
According to NPR, these “hydrological landmarks” last appeared in a drought in 2018.
But according to Andrea Toreti, a senior researcher at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, the present drought that Europe is going through could be the worst in 500 years.
No other events in the previous 500 years, according to Toreti, have been as significant as this one “comparable to the 2018 drought But I believe this year has been worse “reports Euronews.
Over the following three months, there was “a very significant risk of dry conditions continuing,” he warned.
Droughts that are increasingly severe and common are being linked to climate change by a growing body of data. Evaporation is accelerated and precipitation changes as a result of rising global temperatures.
The European Drought Observatory reports that 47 percent of Europe is experiencing drought warning circumstances, which implies there is a lack of moisture in the soil, and another 17 percent is experiencing alert conditions, which indicates stressed plants.
The drought has caused other hidden artifacts to surface in European waterways in addition to the stones. Climate change-related receding floods of the Po River in Italy also uncovered several archaeological artifacts.
The greatest river in the nation experienced its lowest water levels during the worst drought in 70 years, which led to the sunken shipwreck of a barge from World War II to reemerge in June.
More recently, in late July, a 1,000-pound World War II bomb that had been submerged in the Italian river due to drought was discovered.
According to a local official who spoke to Reuters, “the device was uncovered by fisherman on the bank of the River Po due to a reduction in water levels induced by drought.”
It had to be carefully removed by experts.
