World

The Telegraph

The First World War was made more bloody by a "once-in-a-century" climate crisis which rained death on Europe, a study has found. Many of the 700,000 British lives lost in the conflict ended in the “liquid grave” of mud-choked battlefields, and the desolation of places like Passchendaele have become part of the imagery of the First World War. Even on the Turkish coast at Gallipoli troops were immobilised and killed by appalling weather, drowning in their trenches and succumbing to exposure and pneumonia, as well as enemy bullets. Using laser technology to examine glacial ice, Harvard and Climate Change Institute (CCI) analysts have discovered that Tommies fighting the world’s first global conflict also endured a freakish “climate anomaly” which "substantially" increased casualties. The relentless rain which flooded battlefields like the Somme and inflicted famine on civilians was swept over from the Atlantic in rare periods of extreme precipitation caused by changes in the circulation of atmospheric air. With peaks in rain, the Harvard-led study found, came peaks in deaths in bloody campaigns and the Spanish Flu pandemic which followed. A new research paper states this anomalous weather coincided with battles where: “The mud and water‐filled trenches and bomb craters swallowed everything, from tanks, to horses and troops, becoming what eyewitnesses described as the ‘liquid grave’ of the armies.” Prof Alexander F More, who led the research for Harvard, explained: “Atmospheric circulation changed and there was much more rain, much colder weather all over Europe for six years.”