536 was 'the worst year to be alive'

[left-of-center2012]

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 night—for 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 536–539." 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.

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 ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive

[Maraya1969]

1. Maybe things aren't so bad now?

[aeromanKC]

2. 536 to 2020

Hold my beer!!

[-misanthroptimist]

3. The worst year to be alive *so far*

[captain queeg]

4. Just imagine what people thought back then. I'm sure superstations ran amuck

If it baffles modern scientists, civilizations must have been close to collapse. I imagine the church used it to heighten there control and status. Even today if something like that happened without the benefit of satellites, etc, the End Times crowd would be all over it. Even if the science of a volcanic eruption was accepted the religious nuts would say god had caused it to punish evil men for... fill in the blank.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

10. Was 536 too early for conspiracy theories?

[stopdiggin]

5. great stuff! thanks. (nt)

[nilram]

6. Did someone just say Fagradalsfjall?

https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/fagradalsfjall/news/127063/Fagradalsfjall-volcano-Reykjanes-Peninsula-Iceland-4th-eruptive-fissure-opened.html

[Hekate]

7. Very interesting!

[Kablooie]

8. So this kind of weather could happen again.

There's no way to predict it and no way to stop it even today.

[hedda_foil]

9. Fascinating but there's a ridiculous historical error unrelated to the climate event and the plague.

The Eastern Roman Empire, which is better known in the west as the Byzantine Empire did not fall for another millennium, when it was invaded by the Ottoman Turks. Saying its collapse was hastened by something that happened a thousand years before that is historically illiterate.

[live love laugh]

11. Over a hundred years .... we're 50 years in under RepublikkkQan destruction.

It could and will take at least 50 more years to regain any sense of societal normalcy here.