The same type of landing craft that was used on D-Day in 1944 is the latest object to emerge from the declining waters of Lake Nevada.
The lake's level is at a record low due to a long-term dry spell in the American Southwest.
According to Live Science, sunken boats and human corpses have been revealed before now. In one case, the deceased individual appears to have died from a gunshot wound before the body was bundled into a barrel and sunk, leading to speculation it may have been a mob-related killing, according to CBS News.
The Higgins boat is a mostly-plywood vessel based on American swamp boats.
The Japanese submarine that was sunk in WWII and later bombed is ready for virtual reality.
During the 1940s, more than 23,000 boats were built for the U.S. and Allied militaries to carry soldiers and fighting vehicles.
The most famous moment for these boats was on D-Day on June 6, 1944, when they carried American, British and Canadian troops to the beaches in Normandy in France.
The Higgins boat was sold off by the military after World War II because it was surplus to the war effort.
After being used in surveys of the Colorado River, the vessel was sold and sunk to anchor at a depth of nearly 185 feet.
Staff from the National Parks Service began diving on the site in 2006 to remove the engine from the sunken wreck.
The surplus nature of the craft highlights an earlier era of the lake when Las Vegas and Lake Mead were much more remote and removed from much of the United States, where relatively inexpensive WWII surplus could be used for new peaceful purposes in the park.
A New Orleans boat builder designed a boat for the US military in the 1930s, using innovations he'd developed for swamp boats.
The impact of its design on D-Day and other naval operations of World War II was given great credit by the U.S. government.
The wreck of a British sub that was sunk by Germans in WWII has been found.
The lake is formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in Arizona and Nevada. The construction of the dam began in 1931, and the rising lake waters forced the evacuate of several towns.
In 1941, 1983, and 1997 the water in Lake Mead reached its highest point at 1, 220 feet above sea level, but fell by up to 200 feet in the following years.
In terms of volume, it's the largest in the US and provides water to millions of people in Arizona, California and Nevada, according to the National Park Service.
The Southwest has been in a severe dry spell since the late 1990s and the water level at Lake Mead has plummeted. It's now at 1,040 feet above sea level, and the lake is estimated to be only 27% full, according to the US Border Patrol.
A persistent "cold phase" in weather of the tropical Pacific Ocean region causes relatively dry conditions over the Southwest, according to Richard Seager.
The "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s was one of the worst natural disasters in the United States, and it was caused by the peak of an earlier cold phase.
Seager said that rising levels of greenhouse gases, such as the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, may be making the current natural droughts much worse. It reduces precipitation over the southern part of the Southwest in winter and in the spring. It looks like that is already happening.
He said that global warming could cause more water to evaporate from the lake's surface.
It seems the weather in the region is stuck in the dry phase of the long-term pattern and the situation is not likely to improve until that changes.
He said that the reduction of winter and spring precipitation in the southern part of Southwest will continue. It would take a miracle to get back to where they were in the 90s.
It was originally published on Live Science
All Rights Reserved © 2024
