The Mystery of the Missing Headstones: A Graveyard, WWII Bomb, and Surfer

Neill recently took on a geophysics survey to map a graveyard in a British city. But this wasn’t your typical cemetery. The area was surrounded by graves that were a century or so old—but there wasn’t a headstone in sight. That raised an interesting question: where had all the headstones gone?

To solve the mystery, Neill used an electromagnetic profiler, which gave him two key datasets: quadrature and in-phase.

The quadrature data showed ground conductivity. When Neill plugged the data into Surfer and visualized the quad plot, he noticed a lot of blue spots. Blue indicates low conductivity, usually a sign of poorly compacted ground in dry conditions. The spots themselves? Likely graves. But then, something odd popped up in the data.

“The blue spot near the center of the survey was huge, totaling 10 meters across, although it did appear to have an east-west orientation that’d be typical of a grave,” Neill said.

The in-phase data, which revealed magnetic susceptibility, raised even more questions. After analyzing and visualizing the data in Surfer, Neill found that most of the area showed a fairly uniform elevated response—except for one large orange blob of high response, right where the big blue spot was in the quadrature data. Neill’s reaction? It made “absolutely no sense as either a graveyard or natural geology.”

With all this unusual data, Neill came to an intriguing conclusion: a large bomb had exploded in the area during World War II, wiping out the headstones and requiring extensive restoration of the ground using topsoil as fill material. This theory was confirmed by historical records, which showed that a 250 kg bomb had indeed landed in the area in 1942. The crater resulting from the explosion was consistent with a bomb that was dropped by a plane flying parallel to the orientation of the graves. While almost all of the graves themselves remained intact, the bomb crater above them had been back-filled and the area resurfaced with soil, explaining the data.

Neill successfully wrapped up the project and shared his findings with stakeholders. But this wasn’t just another job for him—it was a truly memorable experience. He admitted, “I liked this dataset as it caused me to think hard and logically in the first instance and then correlate my interpretation with historical records.”

Kari Dickenson is a product manager for one of Golden Software’s signature products, Surfer^®. Kari has been with Golden Software since 2000. She grew up in the California Bay Area and received a B.S. in Earth Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Upon graduating, Kari worked as an intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, learning more about hydrogeology and performing laboratory experiments and some basic computer modeling on groundwater remediation strategies. She then returned to school at the Colorado School of Mines where she earned a M.S. in Geology, focusing on economic geology. During her graduate program, Kari discovered that she enjoyed helping other students use computers to solve problems. As a product manager at Golden Software, Kari is able to utilize her knowledge of geology with fulfill her desire to solve problems and help users.