D-Day Fighting Was So Intense That 4% Of Normandy's Beach Is Still Shrapnel

Authored by businessinsider.com and submitted by TheINTL

Geologist Earl McBride It turns out that the fighting on D-Day was so fierce that as much as 4% of the sand on Normandy beaches is magnetic shrapnel that has been broken down over the decades into sand-sized chunks.

From BLDGBLOG, a paper in the upcoming issue of Archeology finds that the spherical metal shards are a significant portion of the beach's composition.

In the photo to the right, see the smooth sphere? It's got a diameter of around one-tenth of a millimeter judging by the legend. That's sixty-year-old shrapnel, sanded down to a smooth, microscopic ball.

Also fascinating is the fact that — within 150 years — the beach will lose most of this metallic memory to rust. The sand-size fragments of steel will also be wiped away by waves and storms.

For now, though, it's still a poignant reminder of the immense loss of life and sacrifice that occurred there almost seventy years ago.

You can read the full post here.

takethebluepill on July 29th, 2018 at 20:46 UTC »

Visited Normandy as a kid. It's amazing how big the craters in the earth still are from bombs. As kids, we ran down them and up the other sides. Standing over the cliffs at Utah Beach was surreal, as well

moose098 on July 29th, 2018 at 19:33 UTC »

I wonder how much of Mamayev Kurgan is made up of shrapnel.

Edit: I found some info on wiki

When the battle ended, the soil on the hill had been so thoroughly churned by shellfire and mixed with metal fragments that it contained between 500 and 1,250 splinters of metal per square meter. The earth on the hill had remained black in the winter, as the snow kept melting in the many fires and explosions. In the following spring the hill would still remain black, as no grass grew on its scorched soil. The hill's formerly steep slopes had become flattened in months of intense shelling and bombardment. Even today, it is possible to find fragments of bone and metal still buried deep throughout the hill.

riversforever on July 29th, 2018 at 17:40 UTC »

Reminds me of the "9,000 Fallen Soldiers" project they did in 2013.

https://i.imgur.com/g7MrkVg.jpg

Every single one of those soldiers etched into the sand had a mother and father. They grew up and had friends. They went to school. They doodled on paper and played in the woods and had secrets they kept to themselves. They had a thousand different ways of reacting to the War in Europe, and yet fate tied their threads all together in a simple, small knot at Normandy on June 6th, 1944.