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In old dump sites, where a lot of bio-debris, wood, paper, metal and tin cans were discarded along with the bottles you are going after, there's a lot of movement in the ground over the following decades. These degradable items would continuously shrink and move over the years, causing a lot of activity, movement and settling to the ground around them. This can cause a lot of wear over time to a bottle, scratching, cracking, pinging, bruises, stress-fractures and total breakage.
The other major form of danger to buried bottles, at least in Maine, is a combination of two things, which are really part of the same process. Ground water will build up in buried bottles over time, through wet springs, summers or fall. Then old man winter comes along cold enough to shrink Santa's sack, and the water in any of these bottles close to the surface would expand and trash the glass, because we all learned in grade school that water expands when frozen. And if this wasn't bad enough, even if they weren't filled with water, or a little too deep to freeze, the buckling and snapping of the ground as it freezes up, can really do a number on bottles too.
Guide created: 10/09/06 (updated 10/17/09)
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