THE WILDFIRES BURNING across Europe this summer have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the blackened landscape: rusty bombs and mines from the World Wars that threaten crews responding to the flames.

Some of the weapons have exploded in the intense heat. Blasts have been reported in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, where a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames near a site of fierce fighting in the Limburg province in 1944.

Fuelled by climate change, the fires and explosions show that the continent’s “climatic luck” is running out, said Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Steady temperatures and predictable rainfall once ensured that most buried weapons stayed dormant.

“Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable,” Njeri said.

Fires can ignite old munitions and also burn away the scrub and brush that hides them.

This wildfire season was supercharged by heavy rains in January that spurred vegetation growth, which became kindling when the summer heat arrived.

Those temperatures, combined with drought conditions, low humidity and stiff winds, offered an ideal environment for fire, according to a study issued last month by the World Weather Attribution group.

In a forest in tinder-dry France, a massive wildfire outside the south-western city of Bordeaux uncovered a cache of what is believed to be Second World War era ammunition.

In the eastern Belgian province of Liege, governor Herve Jamar said “a few sporadic detonations” were recently heard and that emergency services were adapting to account for munitions buried in a fire area.

He said no fire crews were in danger, but local media published photos of a firefighter handling a rusted bomb.

The wreckage of a Second World War German warship emerges in front of Djerdap II, a large dam on the Danube River.

The fire, which stretches across the border into Germany, is smouldering atop a much-bloodied battlefield where Nazis fought Allied troops. The Battle of the Bulge was fought in and around this area.

The fire is even closer to the sites of two lesser-known skirmishes along Elsenborn Ridge and in the Hurtgen Forest, which lasted 88 days and killed about 33,000 American and 28,000 German troops.

Unexploded ordnance is even more dangerous around wildfires because heat can trigger the explosives, said Jonas Tepe, a spokesperson for North Rhine-Westphalia, just across the border in Germany.

Drought has also helped to lay the past bare by shrinking rivers and lakes to reveal old weapons.

In Slovakia, the Danube River fell and exposed two naval mines that police pulled out of the water and buried in a trench for a controlled demolition.

This also exposed the hulls of dozens of Second World War German battleships

In the middle of the river separating Serbia and Romania near the Serbian port of Prahovo, a rusty hull is now visible along with a broken mast where the Nazi flag used to fly.

People look at the wreckage of a Second World War German warship in front of Djerdap II, a large dam on the Danube River, between Romania and Serbia, near Prahovo, Serbia (Darko Vojinovic/AP)

Authorities in Hungary closed Budapest’s Margaret Bridge after a bomb dating from the Second World War emerged at its base in receding water.