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Was the year 536 AD the worst time in human history to be alive?
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-...n-history/
INTRO: In the year 536, daylight itself went away.
Across Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, people looked up and saw a sun that gave little warmth and cast a strange, weak light. Summer brought snow in China. Crops failed virtually everywhere, spreading hunger worse than any plague. Then, only a few years later, an actual plague arrived to top things off.
For historians and climate scientists, 536 has become a leading candidate for the worst year to be alive. “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” Michael McCormick, a historian and archaeologist at Harvard University, told Science.
The claim may sound exaggerated. After all, there have been so many miserable historic events from pandemics to world wars that the title of “worst year in history” must surely be contested. But the case for 536 is pretty strong, supported by an unusually grim convergence of evidence: ancient chronicles, tree rings, ice cores and the chemical fingerprints of eruptions powerful enough to bend climate across continents.
Byzantine historian Procopius, writing from Constantinople, described the world around the year 536 in which “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.” The Roman statesman Cassiodorus later wrote that “the sun seems to have lost its wonted light and appears a bluish colour.”
Modern researchers now explain these accounts by one enormous volcanic eruption, perhaps in Iceland or somewhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. Some evidence also points toward additional eruptions in the years that followed.
“So we think what probably happened [in 536] is there was at least one but maybe up to three big volcanic eruptions, somewhere, either around the equator or in Iceland,” Dr. Miles Pattenden, a Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Australian Catholic University, told ABC RN’s Counterpoint.
“They spewed ash up into the atmosphere that blocked out the sun. We know from written sources that there were serious drops in temperature, both in Europe and in China. There was snow in the summer,” he added.
When volcanoes blast sulfur high into the atmosphere, the particles can form a veil that reflects sunlight back into space. In 536, that veil appears to have cooled summers by roughly 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. It continued like this for years, making it the coldest period in Europe in almost 2,000 years... (MORE - details)
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-...n-history/
INTRO: In the year 536, daylight itself went away.
Across Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, people looked up and saw a sun that gave little warmth and cast a strange, weak light. Summer brought snow in China. Crops failed virtually everywhere, spreading hunger worse than any plague. Then, only a few years later, an actual plague arrived to top things off.
For historians and climate scientists, 536 has become a leading candidate for the worst year to be alive. “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” Michael McCormick, a historian and archaeologist at Harvard University, told Science.
The claim may sound exaggerated. After all, there have been so many miserable historic events from pandemics to world wars that the title of “worst year in history” must surely be contested. But the case for 536 is pretty strong, supported by an unusually grim convergence of evidence: ancient chronicles, tree rings, ice cores and the chemical fingerprints of eruptions powerful enough to bend climate across continents.
Byzantine historian Procopius, writing from Constantinople, described the world around the year 536 in which “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.” The Roman statesman Cassiodorus later wrote that “the sun seems to have lost its wonted light and appears a bluish colour.”
Modern researchers now explain these accounts by one enormous volcanic eruption, perhaps in Iceland or somewhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. Some evidence also points toward additional eruptions in the years that followed.
“So we think what probably happened [in 536] is there was at least one but maybe up to three big volcanic eruptions, somewhere, either around the equator or in Iceland,” Dr. Miles Pattenden, a Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Australian Catholic University, told ABC RN’s Counterpoint.
“They spewed ash up into the atmosphere that blocked out the sun. We know from written sources that there were serious drops in temperature, both in Europe and in China. There was snow in the summer,” he added.
When volcanoes blast sulfur high into the atmosphere, the particles can form a veil that reflects sunlight back into space. In 536, that veil appears to have cooled summers by roughly 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. It continued like this for years, making it the coldest period in Europe in almost 2,000 years... (MORE - details)