Rivers have always played an important role in human development. As people have almost always built their settlements on the banks of rivers, it should come as no surprise that, over the years, plenty of surprising things have eventually made it underwater. But as water levels recently receded quite significantly in some of these rivers and reservoirs, things that were thought to be lost forever have since resurfaced. With that being said, let’s take a look at some of these drought-stricken river discoveries.
10. Spanish Stonehenge
With the Iberian Peninsula undergoing its driest climate in the past 1,200 years, its rivers and reservoirs are also at some of their lowest water levels, particularly during summer. The Valdecanas reservoir, located in the central Spanish province of Caceres, is no exception. Local authorities report that the reservoir’s level dropped to just 28% capacity. This is bad news for both locals and wildlife but an opportunity for archaeologists. As it happens, the receding water line has exposed a circle of megalithic stones. “It’s a surprise, it’s a rare opportunity to be able to access it,” said Enrique Cedillo, an archeologist from the Complutense University in Madrid.
Known officially as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, the so-called Spanish Stonehenge dates back approximately 5,000 years. A dolmen is a horizontal stone slab that’s resting on two vertical stone slabs. Think about the original Stonehenge in England as being a series of dolmens arranged in a circle. These types of manmade prehistoric structures – some more elaborate than others – can be found scattered all across Western Europe, Africa, and Asia, even as far as South Korea. Yet, despite their proliferation across the Old World, very little is known about who built them or for what purpose. In the case of the Spanish Stonehenge, several human remains have been discovered in and around the site, which has prompted some to speculate that it was used as a sort of tomb.
The site was first discovered and documented in 1926 by the German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier. However, under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, the area was flooded in 1963 as part of a rural development project. Since then, the Guadalperal stones have only fully resurfaced four times. In 2013 and 2019, NASA was even able to snap a couple of satellite photos of a dry Spanish Stonehenge.
9. Dead Bodies in Lake Mead, United States
Being the largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead on the Colorado River provides water to over 40 million people spread across seven states. The area has suffered from an ongoing drought for 22 years, bringing its capacity down to just 27%. The water level dropped by as much as 170 feet since reaching its top height in 1983. The lake hasn’t seen this low a level for over 85 years, since 1937 – just two years after the Hoover Dam was constructed. More recently, however, several human skeletal remains were uncovered on what was once the lakebed.
The first set of remains was discovered close to Hemenway Harbor and is believed to have been of a person who died in the late 1970s or 80s. This information was based on the person’s belongings. What’s more, the victim was found inside a barrel and is believed to have died as a result of a gunshot wound. Not even a week later, another set of skeletal remains was discovered by two sisters at Callville Bay. The person is thought to have been between 23 and 37 years old at the time of their passing and to have been in the lake for longer than the one found in Hemenway Harbor. The cause of death is still unknown. An additional two sets of skeletal remains were discovered a couple of weeks apart at Swim Beach. In both cases, the investigation is ongoing, still trying to figure out the actual cause of death.
Being located just 20 miles or about half an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, Lake Mead is believed to have been a so-called “dumping ground” for organized crime in the earlier days of the city. And when it comes to one of these gruesome discoveries, at least, this theory seems to hold some water.
8. WWII Bomb in Italy’s Po River
Running through Italy’s wealthier Northern region, the Po River irrigates roughly a third of the country’s agricultural lands. But suffering through one of the worst droughts in 70 years, Italy’s Po River has run dry in several areas along its 400-mile-long stretch, while other sections have seen a marked drop in water levels. It was in one of these places, near the village of Borgo Virgilio and close to the city of Mantua, that a previously submerged 1,000-pound WWII bomb was discovered by some fishermen.
Once the local authorities were alerted, the army moved in to evacuate the roughly 3,000 people living in the area. They also shut down the airspace above, closed the roads and railways passing by, and temporarily halted navigation on that particular stretch of the waterway. If some people in the immediate vicinity refused to go, the bomb disposal operation would have been halted. But as the village’s mayor, Francesco Aporti, said “At first, some of the inhabitants said they would not move, but in the last few days, we think we have persuaded everyone.” After being defused, the bomb was transported to a quarry some 30 miles away and detonated. As it turned out, the bomb contained a 530-pound explosive and was manufactured in the US.
7. Centuries-Old Chinese Buddhist Statues
The Yangtze River is in the top three longest rivers in the world. Preceded only by the Amazon and the Nile, the Yangtze runs for over 3,900 miles from the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea, close to Shanghai. It’s also the longest river in Asia and the longest river in the world to flow through just a single country. Even its name (Chang Jiang), which is used in most of China, literally translates to “Long River.” It acts as the country’s main waterway and a source of drinking water for over 400 million people. But as rainfall has been around 45% lower than usual and with sweltering temperatures surpassing 104 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, the Yangtze’s water levels have plunged significantly.
Once this happened, a trio of Buddhist statues emerged from beneath the waves on a previously submerged island off Chongqing city in Southwest China. The three statues depicting Buddhist monks sitting and watching over the river were carved straight into an oblong boulder that sits on top of the usually submerged island reef. The statues are believed to be around six centuries old, dating back to the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644). This is also not the first time Buddha statues have emerged from beneath the water. In 2017, a different Buddha statue, also dating to the Ming Dynasty, was discovered in the Jiangxi Province. Locals say the purpose of that statue was to safeguard boats that were regularly upturned in the area. The same thing could apply to these three statues here.
6. Dinosaur Tracks In Texas
As the waters of the Paluxy River dried up completely in many locations along its course, a set of perfectly visible dinosaur tracks emerged. Dubbed the “Lone Ranger trackway,” the tracks consist of 140 prints from a single individual, 60 of which are clearly visible on the dried-up riverbed. They were made by an Acrocanthosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur that lived somewhere between 115 to 105 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous. It stood some 15 feet tall and weighed around seven tons. Other tracks found around the “Lone Ranger trackway” belonged to a Sauroposeidon, a 60-foot-tall herbivorous dinosaur weighing around 44 tons.
While this is a great find, to say the least, it should be mentioned that the segment of the dried-up Paluxy River where the tracks were found flows straight through the aptly named Dinosaur Valley State Park. The area was part of the shoreline of an ancient sea at the time when those tracks, and others in the area, were made. It was only during the past million years that the hard limestone layers were eroded by the Paluxy River and the tracks slowly emerged at the surface.
“Those footprints—they’re spectacular because they’re deep. You can see the toenails. There’s more than one kind, and there’s a lot of them,” said Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Jerry Harris, the director of paleontology at Utah Tech University, said that, while dinosaur tracks are more common than bones, they can reveal additional information such as posture and speed, which cannot always be determined by just examining bones.
5. Hunger Stones Across Central Europe
Being in the midst of one of the most severe droughts in over 500 years, many European rivers have simply run dry or lost a significant part of their volume. As the waters receded all across Central Europe, a series of ominous carvings began to emerge. Simply known as “hunger stones,” such grim messages foreboding famine are known to exist on the banks of the Rhine, Weser, and Moselle rivers, among others in the region. But the most that have resurfaced recently are on the banks of the Elbe River, in the Czech city of Decín, close to the German border.
These so-called hunger stones contain various messages left by people years or even centuries earlier as warnings of likely crop failures and subsequent famine. That’s because these stones only appear above the surface when water levels are extremely low. The inscription on the Elbe River hunger stone, located in Decin, says “When you see me, weep.” The warning is believed to have been carved in 1616. Another stone, this time on the Spree River in Germany states “When you see this stone again, you’ll cry, so shallow was the water in the year 1417.” The people of Traben-Trarbach, a German town closer to the French and Luxembourg borders had a more cheerful tradition. They would leave wine bottles buried under the stone, to be drunk when the rock would reappear.
4. Ancient Roman ‘Bridge of Nero’ in Italy
Like much of the rest of Europe, the city of Rome did not escape the sweltering heat and severe drought. In fact, the Tiber River, which flows through the city, has seen its waters flowing at multi-year lows. Because of the ongoing drought, the remains of a bridge supposedly built by Nero emerged. Nero was the Roman Empire’s fifth emperor (54 to 68 AD) and one of the most important and controversial figures in the empire’s history. “The origins of the bridge are uncertain, given that it is likely a bridge existed here before Nero’s reign and therefore the Pons Neronianus was probably a reconstruction of an earlier crossing,” said Nicholas Temple, professor of architectural history at London Metropolitan University.
Some scholars also believe the bridge was built in a bad location. Rabun Taylor, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that “River bends cutting through pure sediment tend to wander and change shape, so their banks are prone to losing contact with bridge abutments.” He also went on to say that “that’s probably what happened to Nero’s bridge — and it may well have happened by the mid-200s AD, less than two centuries after Nero’s death… the bridge was dismantled at about that time, and the stone piers were reassembled to create a new bridge in a more stable area downstream.”
However, many scholars believe the bridge still played an important role in Ancient Rome. It was located in an area where Roman troops would start their march of triumph. This is basically a military parade that had both political and religious significance. The bridge may also have been used to get high-profile prisoners in and out of the city. St. Peter is believed to have been taken in chains across this particular bridge to the Ager Vaticanus (Vatican Field) to be crucified.
3. Bronze Age City In Iraq
Iraq is no stranger to high temperatures and droughts, but things took a turn for the worst. To keep their crops from dying out, the Iraqi authorities drained part of the Mosul Dam reservoir. And in doing so, an amazing archaeological discovery emerged – a major city from around 3,400 years ago. According to Hasan Ahmed Qasim, the expedition leader and chairman of the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization, “the excavation results show that the site was an important center in the Mittani Empire.” This was an Indo-Iranian empire that flourished between 1500 and 1360 BC in northern Mesopotamia. It extended for roughly 600 miles from the Zagros Mountains in today’s southwestern Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. The ruins possibly belong to the ancient city of Zakhiku – a major hub within the empire.
Locals were aware of the ancient settlement’s existence, at least since the dam’s construction in 1980, but experts never had a chance to properly investigate it before being submerged. The last time the ruins reemerged was in 2018 when the last severe drought lowered water levels enough. At that time, archaeologists explored a massive palace complex with six-foot-thick and 22-foot-high walls, as well as the remains of various wall paintings. But they didn’t get to investigate much more before the waters returned. This time around, they managed to map numerous buildings and catalog hundreds of remarkably well-preserved cuneiform tablets and other artifacts. The team hopes the tablets may shed some light on daily life within the ancient city before it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1350 BC, some ten years after the empire fell to the Hittites, and later, the Assyrians.
2. Sunken Nazi Warships In Serbia
Being one of the largest rivers in Europe, second only to the Volga in Russia, the Danube River flows through ten countries and four capital cities. It should, therefore, be unsurprising that the Danube also has some secrets hidden beneath its depths. And this is precisely what happened at the border between Serbia and Romania when water levels dropped low enough. In an area known as the Iron Gate Gorge, where the Danube cuts through and separates the Carpathian and Balkan Mountains, numerous hulks of WWII Nazi warships emerged.
Historians estimate that around 200 German warships – part of the Nazi Black Sea fleet – were scuttled on the Danube in 1944, close to the Serbian river port of Prahovo. The fleet commander ordered their deliberate sinking after they came under heavy Soviet fire, as a means of slowing down the Russian advance into the Balkans. The problem is that this particular section of the Danube is the most perilous for navigation, even under normal circumstances, let alone when water levels are dangerously low and shipwrecks are everywhere. Oh, and did we mention that these wrecks are still laden with munitions and explosives? Yeah…
Now, in all fairness, most of the 200 shipwrecks were cleared by the Communist Yugoslav authorities soon after WWII ended. However, many remain. Estimates point to around 40 sunken vessels should still be down there but only 21 of those pose a hazard for other vessels passing by. With the help of the EU, Serbia will undergo a salvage operation, removing the explosives from the ships and destroying the wrecks where they stand, instead of dragging them out of the river one by one.
1. ‘Drowned’ Villages
Back in 1992, Aceredo village, located in northwestern Spain, was flooded to make room for the Alto Lindoso reservoir. Now, when the reservoir is at just 15% capacity, the abandoned village resurfaced. Locals and tourists alike can now walk among the derelict buildings, collapsed roofs, and other debris. You can also come across stacked beer bottles by what seems to have been a cafe, as well as a still functioning drinking fountain.
A similar story happened at roughly the same time but in England, when a previously “drowned” village reemerged. Back in the 1940s, the residents of Derwent in Derbyshire had to abandon their homes to make room for the Ladybower Reservoir. Fun fact: This particular reservoir and the surrounding valley were used by the notorious Dambusters for practice runs before successfully bombing and breaching two dams in the Nazi heartland as part of Operation Chastise. Anyway, since the dam’s construction more than 70 years ago, the submerged village only resurfaced three times in 1976, 1995, and again in 2022.