The wildfires burning across Europe this summer have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the blackened landscape: rusty bombs and mines from World War I and II.
Fueled by climate change, the fires and explosions show that the continent’s “climatic luck” is running out, said Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Steady temperatures and predictable rainfall once ensured that most buried weapons stayed dormant.
“Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable,” Njeri said. Fires can ignite old munitions but can also burn away the scrub and brush that hides them.
Expose? Was the bomb doing something clandestine?
Maybe they’ve taken to this whole loitering thing I keep hearing about
Exposed to the air / elements I guess?
Expose as in ‘exhibitionist’, not as in ‘spy’.
Stupid, sexy unexploded ordinance