(Image: Jens Wolf/AFP/Getty Images)
Extreme weather called for extreme remedies to staunch the flow of the river Elbe, Germany, on Sunday. This photo shows a barge being pushed to join two others that had already been scuppered with explosives the day before in an attempt to seal a 90-metre breach in a dyke.
The emergency engineering worked – but not before the neighbouring village of Fischbeck and 200 square kilometres had been flooded.
Flooding began to spread across central Europe after an unusually rainy spring was capped off by two days of intense downpour: as much rain fell on Austria on 30 May and 1 June as would normally fall over two months, according to the Central Institution for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Vienna.
The deluge was brought by a low-pressure system that remained stuck in place for several days. Similar “blocking events” have been responsible for many other extreme weather events in the northern hemisphere in recent years – including the European heatwave in 2003, the Russian heatwave and the Indus river flood in Pakistan in 2010, and the 2011 US heatwave.
Some climate scientists think the surge of blocking events is linked to the rapid warming in the Arctic. In March, for instance, Stefan Rahmstorf and Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, suggested that these changes are amplifying atmospheric patterns known as planetary waves. In other words, climate change could well be to blame for the floods.
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