Western Europe has just endured its hottest June‑to‑July period ever recorded, according to the EU’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus and the continent’s landscapes are now showing the dramatic consequences.
Persistent high‑pressure systems brought relentless sunshine and soaring temperatures, but scientists say the deeper driver is long‑term climate change, fuelled by decades of fossil‑fuel emissions that have made extreme heatwaves far more frequent and far more intense.
Across Europe, the impact has been unmistakable. The Danube, the continent’s second‑longest river, has plunged to its lowest levels in 30 years, revealing extraordinary finds on its exposed riverbed from mammoth bones in Bulgaria to a sunken WWII warship resurfacing in Serbia.
In Hungary and Romania, the shrinking river has forced nuclear power stations to shut down or operate at reduced capacity because they can no longer draw enough water for cooling
The Rhine has also suffered. Cargo vessels have been stranded, river cruises cancelled, and commercial routes disrupted as water levels dropped below navigable depths. What should be Europe’s thriving summer waterways have instead become symbols of a continent under climatic stress.
Scientists warn that these scenes may become increasingly common unless global emissions fall sharply. For now, Europe is left grappling with a summer that has rewritten the record books and reshaped its rivers, industries and daily life.
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