Stunning yet ghostly photos show a Romanian village drowned beneath a multi-coloured lake of toxic sludge and water.
Geamana was once packed with inhabitants inside a fertile valley until the end of the 1970s when large reserves of copper were discovered nearby.
The country's then communist dictator, the infamous Nicolae Ceaușescu, ordered the go-ahead for copper mining to begin.
He needed somewhere to put all the toxic waste produced from the mining, which turned out to be very bad news for Geamana.
The population of the picturesque village were forcibly evacuated to other villages in 1978 to make way for the tonnes of waste that was poured into it from the Rosia Poieni mine.
Its 300 or so families were offered around £1,500 for their homes by the government at the time.
However, a few hardy residents refused to leave and continue to live on there despite no schools or infrastructure being left.
All that remains of the small village today is a sterile and 90-metre deep toxic lake that shimmers with fluorescent colours.
The eerie images reveal swathes of orange, green and yellow covering the village with only a few building tops, including a church spire, poking through.
It was reported that the mining company wanted to demolish the spire until the residents spoke out against it.
However, the lake continues to rise and one day any sign of former life will be swallowed up whole by the murky waters.
One resident called Maria Prate, who is in her 70s, moved to higher ground once the toxic sludge was poured into her home land.
She said: “What’s done is done. The village is an abandoned place now. At least [with the mine here], the people have work.”
The Rosia Poieni mine is the second-largest copper mine in Europe and employs around 500 people.
The villagers were also told that their ancestors' graves would be relocated, but this never happened.
One photographer who visited the site told the Daily Mail : "They were upset that they had lost their graves, but their approach to the loss of their village was, 'yeah it's horrible, but without that mine there wouldn't be any jobs here'.
"It was really impressive that they saw the situation as complex, rather than black and white, despite everything they'd been put through."
Elsewhere, residents in an otherwise idyllic town in California in the US are living with the deadly dust and toxic fumes thrown up regularly from a nearby lake.
Salton Sea has been shrinking for decades and exposing harmful elements such as powdery arsenic, leaving many Imperial County inhabitants to deal with its "sulphurous stench" and an increased risk of asthma and allergies.
