Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWhy 536 AD Was The Worst Year To Be Alive - Scientists Explain Chroniclers' Tales Of Icy Fog
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and nightfor 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the icea spike in airborne leadmarks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.
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Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. Three years ago polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica yielded a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun's light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruptionperhaps in North America, the team suggestedstood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540. Sigl's team concluded that the double blow explained the prolonged dark and cold.
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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive
safeinOhio
(32,715 posts)an earth quake with huge tidal wave,a solar flare, a few more authoritarian leaders away from the end of the world as we know it.
If we can only make it another 20 years. I'll be checking out by then.
SammyWinstonJack
(44,130 posts)NurseJackie
(42,862 posts)calimary
(81,466 posts)I find myself hoping Im done and gone before the polar bears are.
But who knows? Maybe some of the kids we leave behind will be among those who figure out how we survive as a species - and as a planet.
Stuckinthebush
(10,847 posts)Sometime in the late 1400s was bad as well at least for the indigenous people of the Americas. Wiped out by disease and Europeans seems horrendous. But, 536 sounds like a hellish experience.
Nitram
(22,877 posts)I wouldd have to say that 1918 must hav been just as bad for Europe, with WWI, various genocides, and the infuenza epidemic. A vvolcanic winter, though, would hav affected every soul on Earth.
Hestia
(3,818 posts)of the Modern World" about the same time period 535-536 BCE
[link:https://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Investigation-Origins-Modern-World-ebook/dp/B000FC1H7I/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542640136&sr=1-3&keywords=catastrophe|
hatrack
(59,592 posts)A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and nightfor 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
A collapse that was so hastened that it took place in 1453.
Oh well . . . .