Created: 08/19/2022 3:49 p.m
If there is no rain, it means one thing above all: dried up meadows, forests and fields. Due to climate change, such drought periods will occur more frequently in Germany in the future. This can have fatal consequences for nature, but also for people.
1 / 15 rivers are suffering from the prolonged drought. At Bingen, for example, an island in the Rhine can currently be reached on foot due to the low water level. © Thomas Frey/dpa
2 / 15 An extreme example: the dried-up river bed of the Dreisam near Teningen. © Philipp von Ditfurth/dpa/archive image
3 / 15 The low water in the Rhine is a major problem for cargo ships: due to the low water level, they can only sail with a small load. © Christoph Reichwein/dpa
4 / 15 In some places, the water level in the Rhine is down to minus two meters. This is a record low in many places. © Federico Gambarini/dpa
5 / 15 Due to the low tide, many hidden treasures reappear, such as this old shipwreck. © Christoph Reichwein/dpa
6 / 15 In addition to the large rivers, the smaller ones are drying up almost completely. In this case an entire section of the Black Elster in southern Brandenburg. © Patrick Pleul/dpa/archive image
7 / 15 Entire lakes and ponds are also drying up, like this fish pond in Brandenburg an der Havel. © Kevin Dettlaff/dpa
8 / 15 The regional drought is causing massive problems, especially in agriculture. Farmers and farmers can no longer irrigate their fields sufficiently. © Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa/archive image
9 / 15 Farmers like Michael Kreß from Hardthausen-Gochsen hit the heat and drought particularly hard. Corn fields have completely dried up due to the heat and drought. © Nicole Mücke
10 / 15 Some corn farmers are expecting a 40 to 50 percent drop in yield due to the persistent drought. © Harald Tittel/dpa
11 / 15 The forest also suffers from the lack of rain. A silver fir, about two years old, has dried up. This fate befalls many young trees. © Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa/archive image
12 / 15 But the extent of the drought is even greater: entire forest regions catch fire. Roland Pietsch, head of a national park, stands in front of such a charred forest area in the Harz Mountains. © Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa
13 / 15 A single cigarette butt is often enough to set an entire forest area on fire. © –/Wiesbaden112.de/dpa/Archive image
14 / 15 In Lower Saxony, the fire brigade had to put out 98 forest fires on an area of 4.5 hectares last year (2021). In previous years there were even a total of 270 or 285 forest fires in the state. © Carsten Schmidt/Feuerwehr Bleckede/dpa/Symbolbild
15 / 15 However, the problem is often not the number of forest fires, but the size of the burnt areas. On June 25, 2022 alone, an area of 2,800 hectares burned, which corresponds to around 4,000 soccer fields. © Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/symbol image
