Both of the world wars, along with more recent conflicts like the Yugoslav wars and the ongoing war and Donbass have littered the continent with millions of bombs, shells, landmines and grenades.

And a lot of these explosives still remain undetonated where they were fired or dropped decades ago.

In this way, the echoes of these long, distant wars still roar across the continent from time to time and claimed new victims for old conflicts, a reminder that the price of war has aftershocks and consequences, the last well beyond the lifetimes of the people who fought in them.

Wars affect generations of people after their fought, and here is how a century of conflict in Europe continues to violently affect the lives of people who live there Today.

This is a map of Europe that shows where the highest concentrations of leftover unexploded ordinance, or UFOs, exist.

The most heavily affected regions are Spain, from the Spanish civil War, the north east of France and Belgium from the First World War.

The area around London and southern England from the Blitz.

Germany and Italy from years of bombing and fighting in the Second World War.

Bosnia and Croatia from the Yugoslav wars and eastern Ukraine from the ongoing war and dawn pass.

So let's begin with Spain.

Since the 19 eighties, the Spanish authorities have recovered and disarmed over 750,000 pieces of explosives left over from the Spanish Civil War fought in the 19 thirties.

Even during the 20 tens, over 1000 pieces of leftover artillery shells, bombs or grenades were still discovered and destroyed across the country every year.

But the situation in other countries is even more extreme.

Let's take a look at France and specifically the northeastern part of the country.

During the first World War, the German empire invaded through Belgium and then moved on to invade and occupy a large part of northeastern France.

The two sides fired millions of tons of shells that one another across the front line that developed here during the war, and approximately one in three of these shells never actually detonated.

In the EAP salient alone, it's believed that 300 million projectiles the British and Germans fired at one another were duds, and most of them have never been recovered.

The bombs and shells were buried when they hit the ground or swallowed up by the mud, and they occasionally come back up to the surface over time.

So because of the millions of tons of unexploded bombs still lurking about, the French government established this zone in the north east of the country after the end of the war, and the red area in particular here became known as Zone Rouge, the area of France that was the most severely destroyed and ravaged by the conflict with the highest concentrations of unexploded shells.

Human settlement, habitation and trespassing in the zone were forbidden, and the area was left alone to return back to nature.

What's crazy, though, is that there are still some areas within the zone rouge that are off limits to humans.

Even today in 2020 and in some of these areas, the concentration of unexploded shells are as high as 300 per 10,000 square meters in just the top 15 centimeters of soil, which is about the same size as just a single city block.

99% of all plant life continues to die in these areas even today, because of the vast amounts of lead, mercury, arsenic and other poisons that have contaminated the soil.

The French authorities continue to remove around 900 tons of shells from the area every year.

And ever since the end of the war in 1918 630 French and over 20 Belgian clearers have lost their lives, trying their best to heal the scar and return the land to its original beauty.

It may take 300 MAWR years before the last of the zone rouge is successfully cleared back to normal.

And so it remains an ugly scar across France that reminds us of darker times.

But Europe has even more scars on her face that came from conflicts after the first World War.

Let's take southern England, for example, between 1940 1944 the German Reich dropped 30,000 tons of bombs across the United Kingdom during the blitz.

Most of these landed across London and southern England, and many of them never exploded and remain hidden across the area today, like old sleeping Nazi sentinels just waiting to claim even more victims in our modern age.

In 2007 a bomb was discovered in Plymouth that required the evacuation of 1000 people.

And in 2018 another big German bomb was discovered underwater in the Thames, which forced London city airports to cancel all of their flights while it was defused.

Every so often, the discovery of old bomb somewhere in England triggers the evacuation of thousands.

But the discovery of old bombs in Germany will sometimes trigger the evacuation of tens of thousands, while Germany only managed to drop 30,000 tons of bombs on the UK, the Allies managed to in turn drop 1.35 million tons of bombs on Germany, and around 10% of these never exploded.

So that's 13,500 tons of bombs that continued to exist in Germany following their surrender in 1945 which makes German bomb diffusers the busiest in the entire world because they discover in disarm one roughly every two weeks in the country.

On average.

Some notable recent discoveries include a 1.8 ton R A F bomb found in Copeland's in 2011 that caused 45,000 people to be evacuated.

Ah, £500 American bomb found in Munich in 2012 that was blown up on site, which you can watch in the spectacular video here on YouTube.

Another 1.8 tons R A F bomb found in Ox Berg in 2016 that caused the evacuation of 54,000 people and another really big British bomb found in downtown Frankfurt during construction work in 2019.

That prompted the evacuation of 75 1000 people from the area, the largest evacuation in Germany's entire history.

Post World War Two.

Smaller bomb discoveries and evacuations happen every year in cities all across Germany, just another lasting consequence of a war fought 80 years ago that affects the lives of people still living there today.

But the hardest hit area of Europe suffers the consequences of USOs from a much more recent conflict, Bosnia and Croatia.

Between 1991 and 2001 the former Yugoslavia descended into civil war and chaos that tore the country apart and paved the weight independence for many of the nationalities that lived there In Bosnia, particularly all three competing factions within the country during the wars collectively deployed over two million landmines to protect their defensive lines.

Bosnia and Hercegovina is not a big country, and that war wasn't a long time ago and as a result, Bosnia has the worst land mine contamination problem of any country in the world today.

This is a map of all 28,699 locations of landmines remaining in the country.

As of 2013 2.4% of all Bosnia's land is contaminated by mines.

So for the sake of comparison, if 2.4% of America's land was the same, it would be as if the entire state of Michigan was one gigantic active minefield.

Over 80,000 individual active land mines are believed to still exist across these areas of Bosnia, and they continue to hurt people all the time.

During the actual war in Bosnia, landmines killed 3399 people in the country.

But since the war ended, the land mines have continued to kill an additional 1750 people, all of whom had toe violently die completely needlessly after the piece was already signed and agreed to.

Land mines kill indiscriminately and without mercy, and the majority of victims are always Children and civilians.

Bosnia and Hercegovina is actively trying their best to clear the country of these ugly scars.

But without a source of serious funding, that goal is nowhere close on the horizon, and nearby Croatia to is a country that continues to be plagued by the scourge of landmines.

Just like in Bosnia.

Every side in the Croatian war of Independence used landmines extensively to the point where 1.5 million were deployed across the country as of 2013.

This is a map of the location for all of the minefields that continue to exist here.

31,000 total mines marked by over 12,000 warning signs that places one out of every five Croatians within close proximity to an active landmine.

Since the end of the war in Croatia, leftover land mines have killed over 500 people and severely injured 1500 more by causing life changing injuries like the loss of a leg the landmine situation in both Croatia and Bosnia Hercegovina, our national tragedies that continue to claim victims every single year from wars that ended decades ago.

Landmines are simply evil and should never be used during any war because of how indiscriminately they kill, regardless of age, regardless of profession and regardless of even time, wars always have lasting consequences.

And they sometimes stretch out into the future like ghosts to claim fresh victims, sometimes born generations after their intended targets were.

Now I know that ending was a pretty depressing way toe.

Leave this video off.

So let me breathe back A bit of optimism here.

While scientific thinking to fight wars in the 20th century created some evils, like mass strategic bombing landmines or rocket attacks, they also created some good out of the ashes, like jet aircraft that allowed for the revolution in global transportation and rocket technology that eventually got humans into space and the moon.

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