Event Description
In June 2023, the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam drained a reservoir that had covered the lower Dnipro floodplain since the 1950s. The Great Meadow, or Velykyi Luh, the historic landscape, came back into the air after seventy years underwater: two thousand square kilometers of exposed sediment, now a frontline, and a growing forest.
This talk presents the Great Meadow Atlas, a collaborative mapping platform built this autumn. The atlas layers cartographic and aerial records of the floodplain from 1853 to 2026, including German reconnaissance imagery from 1943 and satellite time series across the 2023 draining, alongside nearly seven thousand historical photographs, biodiversity surveys, and contamination data from the exposed bed. Speakers will show how these sources are being read together to reconstruct what was drowned, what has surfaced, and what is at stake in the debate over whether to rebuild the dam. The project treats the Great Meadow as a built landscape rather than a wilderness, and asks what that means for its preservation.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email Eileen Huhn at [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
