As the Danube goes, so goes much of Europe. The 1,800-mile-long
river that flows from southern Germany to the Romanian lowlands,
described by E/The Environmental Magazine‘s Colin Woodard
as ‘Europe’s most magnificent waterway’ was withering and dying
during a heat wave of epic proportions last summer. For centuries
the river served as the link between west and east, modernity and
tradition. But when the Danube fell to its lowest level in more
than a century last summer, temperatures in France reached 104
degrees, killing a mind-boggling 15,000. ‘The heat buckled roads in
Germany and forced Portugal to suspend rail traffic,’ Woodard
reports.
The low water levels unveiled plenty of surprises: the
foundations of Budapest’s ornate bridges, grasses and saplings
sprouting from the mud, illegal immigrants wading from Bulgaria to
Romania across the shrunken Danube. Woodard writes: ‘Water levels
exposed previously unseen World War II-era bombs in Budapest, tanks
in Croatia, and sunken German ships. In Novi Sad, where NATO planes
destroyed bridges in 1999, river traffic was blocked for three
weeks because water levels had fallen so low that Serbian
authorities were no longer able to open a temporary pontoon
bridge.’
Scientists blame the heat wave and low water levels on global
warming, though they can’t prove that greenhouse gasses in the
atmosphere ’cause’ any certain event. ‘It’s not just that the water
is so low this year,’ Woodards quotes Janos Zlinszky of the
Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe in
Szentendre, Hungary. ‘The glaciers [in the nearby Alps] are
shrinking more and more every year, and there is much less snowpack
to feed the rivers.’
— Jacob Wheeler
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Europe’s
Scorching Summer
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