BELOW The First World War coincided with a climatic anomaly that brought increased rain and colder weather, contributing to the conflict’s infamously muddy battlefields. Wet conditions were a particular feature of Passchendaele the 3rd Battle of Ypres in

War, plague, and pollution from a European ice core

For millennia, fresh ice forming on a European glacier marked the passing years like tree rings. But over time these layers became compressed, preventing individual years within the depths of the ice from being examined individually. A new technology is now unlocking this remarkable repository of information, as Alexander More, Christopher Loveluck, Michael McCormick, and Paul Mayewski told World Archaeology.

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World Archaeology

November 19, 2019

Mud is one of the signature horrors of the First World War. Photographs, paintings, and poems capture nightmarish landscapes pitted with shell craters and slick with oozing earth. Soldiers manning flooded defences risked succumbing to trench foot, while attacking troops could find themselves literally bogged down. But such haunting conditions were not an automatic consequence of the stalemate on the Western Front. While the struggle for a military breakthrough forced soldiers to live in subterranean shelters all year round, these troops were not experiencing normal weather. Instead, study of material preserved in an ice core from the heart of Europe has revealed that fighting overlapped with

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