Sunken boat from Lake Mead is another object to emerge

A sunken boat dating back to the Second World War is the latest object to emerge from a shrinking reservoir that straddles Nevada and Arizona.

The landing craft Higgins, which has been 185 ft 56 meters below the surface, is almost halfway out of the water at Lake Mead.

The boat is less than a mile from Lake Mead Marina and Hemingway Harbor.

It was used to survey the Colorado River decades ago, was sold to the marina and then sunk, according to the dive tours company Las Vegas Scuba.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Higgins Industries in New Orleans built a number of thousand landing craft between 1942 and 1945. On June 6th, 1944, around 1,500 Higgins boats were deployed to Normandy, known as D-Day.

The boat is just the latest in a series of objects un-discovered due to declining water levels in Lake Mead, the largest human-made reservoir in the US, held back by the Hoover Dam. In May, two sets of human remains were found in the span of a week.

Experts say climate change and drought have led to the lake dropping to its lowest level since it was full about 20 years ago.

As water levels drop at both Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream on the Arizona-Utah line, states in the US west are facing deeper cuts to their supply from the Colorado River. The lower levels also affect the hydropower produced at Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back Lake Powell.

Camille Touton, the US Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, said last month that the agency would take action to protect the system if the seven states in the Colorado River basin don't come up with a way to cut the use of up to 4 m acre-feet of water more than Arizona and Nevada's share combined.

An acre-foot is about 325,850 gallons of water about 1.23 m liters An average household uses one-half to one acre-foot of water a year.

The two states of California and New Mexico have enacted voluntary and mandatory cuts. Water from some reservoirs in the upper basin of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah has been released to prop up Lake Powell. Farmers use a large portion of the river's supply.