Interesting things can happen during a big drought.
Not just the “interesting” stuff of, y’know, dying herds and baking fields, but the, “now that’s interesting” sort of stuff such as putting an end to local legends and bringing long-drowned secrets to light.
The volcanic plains south-west of Melbourne are dotted with hundreds of crater lakes. Many were long reputed to be “bottomless”, or at the very least, joined by underground waterways to the ocean to the south. Then the Millennium drought happened and many of them dried up completely.
As it turned out, the “bottomless” lakes were just a few metres deep. The underground waterways never existed.
Decades before that, the 1980s drought dried up man-made lakes like Eildon reservoir. Farmsteads that hadn’t been seen in nearly a century were exposed again.
The drought in California is drying up Lake Mead. Lake Mead is known to most of us as the scenic backdrop to movies from The Planet of the Apes to Point Break. The man-made reservoir is also the largest dam in America.
But its water levels are plummeting. It has reached its lowest level since it was filled in 1937 — and all sorts of stuff is showing up.
The recent spate of discoveries began in May when boaters spotted a barrel. Inside were the remains of a man who officials say was shot between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. The killing has the signature of a “mob hit”, the local Mob Museum said, and coincided “with the most violent period in Las Vegas’s past – an era of unprecedented street crime and underworld killings” […]
Officials expect more grim finds, and have already received calls from visitors about possible remains that turned out to be animal bones or prop skeletons left by local scuba divers years earlier.
But it ain’t all sheep and props.
Earlier this week, someone alerted park rangers to additional human remains, partially encased in mud, along a beach. The investigation is continuing, the park said in a statement.
There are slightly less gruesome finds, as well.
This summer a sunken second world war-era boat began to jut out from the water. The Higgins landing craft, models of which were deployed at Normandy, was once used to survey the Colorado River and then sold to the marina before it sank.
A crashed B-29 plane has been in the water since 1948. It’s still far below the surface, but as the water levels fall light is reaching the plane for the first time in decades, 8NewsNow reported.
Like the Australian homestead in the 80s, an entire town has emerged from the waters.
Lake Mead is a not natural body of water, Green points out. It was formed with the creation of the Hoover Dam, which submerged St Thomas, a Mormon settlement founded in 1865. One of the town’s final residents left in 1938 when waters reached his front door, according to the Deseret News. Declining lake levels, which have exposed St Thomas several times over the years, have kept the settlement visible for the last 10 years.
The lake also covered archaeological digs, said [Michael Green], who teaches about the history of Nevada and Las Vegas, meaning there could be historical items in the water.
“There might actually be some archaeological relics,” Green said, adding that a nearby museum has artifacts from the Puebloan people, who lived in the area about a thousand years earlier.
Archaeologists were working there until the lake was rising around them.”
The Guardian
All in all, the vast reservoir’s water level has dropped by over 50 metres since 1983 when the Colorado River flooded over its spillways.
The cause is not just the long-running drought, but over-extraction as California’s population has swelled. Now, Lake Mead is down to 27% capacity.
Who knows what they’ll find next?