A record-warm summer likely accelerated the already rapid melting of Italy’s high-altitude glaciers, revealing long-frozen artifacts.
Wasn’t on my “apocalyptic outcomes of melting permafrost” bingo card.
A record-warm summer likely accelerated the already rapid melting of Italy’s high-altitude glaciers, revealing long-frozen artifacts.
Wasn’t on my “apocalyptic outcomes of melting permafrost” bingo card.
Unexploded world war ordinance always make me wonder. Where the shells that unreliable or is it just that that many were fired? Both?
In WW2 at least a subset (like 1%) of dropped bombs (not shells) had a random timer and only exploded once that ran out. This was to ensure detonations occured even hours after a bombing raid.
Those timers were based on acids dissolving something inhibiting the detonator. As such they were quite unreliable, especially if they buried themselves into the ground at certain angles.
Earlier bombs were unreliable. It wasn’t rare to have an entire squadron in multiple sorties to target a single bridge even in uncontested skies.
The bad navigation and aiming equipment as well as dumb bombs resulted in COP to be in 100s of meters in best case. This was exacerbated by flaky mechanisms: better to have UXO than to accidentally grief some ground staff.
That’s mostly what we see today. Bombs in random areas because the flight lost track of position or met a cloudy patch of skies on the target and decided to drop the payload to maintain their return range.
Thanks! That explains a lot.
Those are ww1 artillery shells though. The Dolomites were on the frontline between Italy and Austro-Hungary. The alpine war is very interesting to read about, I highly recommend it.
I don’t know by what percentage, which also fluctuated over the years and from nation to nation, but a lot of them were either duds or didn’t explode due to soft ground or angle of impact not triggering it.