Extreme Drought in Greece Reveals Sunken Village Close to Athens

The ruins of the village of Kallio are resurfacing from the substitute Lake Mornos, a reservoir in Greece, attributable to record-breaking temperatures and an prolonged drought within the area.

The village was submerged within the late Seventies when a dam was constructed to create a reservoir 124 miles (200 kilometers) west of Athens. Almost 80 properties within the city, in addition to its church and faculty, had been deserted to make room for the reservoir. According to Reuters, the reservoir provides water to just about half of the Greek inhabitants.

Final winter was Greece’s warmest on report, and now, a month after the hottest July on record, the lake stage has dropped to the purpose that the village has resurfaced.

“The extent of Lake Mornos has dropped by 40 meters (131 toes),” Yorgos Iosifidis, a former resident of the city, advised the AP. Kallio additionally reappeared in a drought within the early Nineteen Nineties, the AP reported. Surreal photographs of the lake, taken in current days, are a reminder of the fragility of Earth’s local weather.

In photographs of the lake, one can see the “bathtub ring” that exhibits the beforehand submerged land and waterline of the lake. The state of affairs might worsen earlier than it improves, as dry circumstances additionally present circumstances for wildfires.

According to Greece’s environment ministry, water reserves in Lake Mornos and three different reservoirs within the area have practically halved, from 1.2 billion cubic meters (42.4 billion cubic toes) in 2022 right down to 700 million cubic meters (24.7 billion cubic toes) final month. And that’s to not point out that 2022 was Europe’s worst drought in 500 years, according to a report by the International Drought Observatory.

The International Drought Observatory launched a July report on drought in Europe that discovered soil moisture was down in Greece and vegetation was harassed; the identical circumstances had been reported in different components of central Europe together with Italy, Romania, the Balkans, and Türkiye. The Acropolis archaeological web site in Athens was closed for hours in July to forestall guests’ publicity to excessive temperatures.

Extreme droughts have additionally hit stateside in the last couple of years. In July, a dam failure in New Mexico pressured the town of Albuquerque to rely on groundwater, in a reminder that immediately’s conveniences are sometimes reliant on ageing infrastructure.

After all, a starker reminder of the fragility of our world is the reappearance of a whole village, put to the sword many years beforehand within the title of water accessibility.