Lake Mead
Millennium drought in western USA: WWII boat emerges from shrinking reservoir
World War II relic unearthed: A sunken landing craft near Lake Mead Marina, the reservoir’s oldest marina.
© Ethan Miller/Getty Images/AFP
In the western United States, the worst drought in 1,200 years is causing the level of Lake Mead to continue to drop. Now the reservoir has released a sunken World War II boat that used to be more than 50 meters under water.
The diving club Las Vegas Scuba advertises on its website with “great dives” to the wreck, but that’s over now: a World War II boat that previously sank more than 50 meters in Lake Mead has resurfaced. The dramatically falling level of the largest reservoir in the USA released the Higgins landing craft.
1500 Higgins boats deployed on D-Day
The wreck is about a mile from the lake’s oldest marina, Lake Mead Marina. The US military used the boats, named after their designer Andrew Jackson Higgins, to storm beaches and to bring troops and supplies ashore from larger ships. As soon as they reached the beach, the front was lowered, the soldiers ran out and rushed to shore.
Higgins Industries of New Orleans built more than 20,000 landing craft during the war, as the National World War II Museum writes. 1500 of them came according to the museum used during the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944 — D-Day. The Higgins boat in Lake Mead was used to survey the Colorado River that feeds the reservoir, according to Las Vegas Scuba. It was later sold to the marina and then sunk.
“There are relatively few working or museum specimens of the Higgins boat like the one currently emerging from Lake Mead,” quotes the “Las Vegas Review-Journal” the national park administration. Therefore, it will surely attract the attention of park visitors. The administration appeals to visitors to “leave the place as you found it to avoid damaging the boat”.
Worst drought in 1,200 years shrinks Lake Mead
The wreck is just the latest in a series of objects to be surfaced by falling water levels in Lake Mead – the country’s largest man-made reservoir of water, which serves millions of people. Human remains were even discovered in a barrel in May.
The cause of the dramatically low level is the years of extreme lack of precipitation in the western United States. According to a study published in February published in the UK journal Nature Climate Change, the prolonged dry season is actually the worst “mega drought” in the region for at least 1,200 years. As a result, Lake Mead’s water level has dropped to its lowest level since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1937. While the surface of the reservoir on the Nevada-Arizona border was 373.4 meters above sea level at its record high in July 1983, it is currently only almost 318 meters.
Decades of periods with too little precipitation have plagued western North America before, according to the “Nature Climate Change” study. However, the current one is particularly severe and more than 40 percent is due to human-caused climate change.
Sources: Associated Press, Las Vegas Scuba, “Las Vegas Review Journal”, National World War II Museum I, National World War II Museum II, US National Park Service, Lakes Online, “Nature Climate Change”