![]() ![]() Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread” across the latter half of the 530s. European order was already in turmoil from warlords fighting amongst the power vacuum of the fallen Roman Empire, as the Byzantine Empire (and legendary Emperor Justinian the Great) began to swoop back into Italy.Īs shown from the ice record, the long dark throughout the sixth century meant that crops failed from Ireland to China. Before this, there was no other explanation than pure exaggeration by chroniclers for the chaos that ensued in Eurasia – no link to a Volcano thousands of miles away in Iceland! Famine swoops across Europe.įalling temperatures brought dire implications for farming, putting a strain on food resources, after leaving significant parts of Northern and Central Europe in almost complete darkness!įurther natural disasters put even more strain on food supplies. ![]() Kyle Harper, a Medieval and Roman historian at the University of Oklahoma, suggested that the use of ice cores gives ‘a new kind of record,’ which helps historians understand the context of a period significantly more than ever before. Two other massive eruptions came in 540 and 547, maintaining the cool temperatures. Though the mysterious clouds have now been identified and understood, it seems that the worst year in history was only getting started. Byzantine Historian Procopius wrote, “the sun giving forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.” With the sun’s light impaired and summer temperatures at all-time lows, things were bound to get worse! The reaction to the coldest decadeĪt the time of the Eastern Roman Empire’s existence (before becoming the Byzantine Empire), the Roman politician Cassiodorus described the sun as having a blue tint. The discovery from the swiss glacier (the Colle Gnifetti glacier) was particularly damning for the year, as it helped create a chilly summer.Īs the sun gave off light and heat, the so-called ‘dark ages’ became a particularly dark time in the human past, as temperatures dropped between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees celsius.Īccording to research on the ice core, this left the human population frozen for the better part of a decade. Mayewski and McCormick discovered that a calamitous, massive volcanic eruption early in 536 in Iceland caused volcanic ash to rain across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, including most parts of what was the then Eastern Roman Empire. ![]() Read more: The Extraordinary Evolution of the Dunce Cap ![]() They are quite literally the epitome of human history and human pollution, frozen in time. Often, they’re used to understand human effects on climate change in less historical contexts. Ice cores are typically taken in their tens of thousands, each representing just a few days, weeks, or months within history. The largest drills can reach two miles (3.2km) under the earth’s surface and retrieve ice samples 800,000 years old. Mayewski took the core from the Swiss Alps, revealing more than 2,000 years of historical information. Volcanic eruptionĪlong with glaciologist Paul Mayewski, McCormick discovered an ancient ice core while researching on behalf of the Climate Change Institute of the University of Maine. The ash fell across the Northern hemisphere early in the year, and a mysterious fog plunged Europe into an even darker age for a decade. The sun gave way to ash in the sky as a result of a volcanic eruption. The honor of ‘the worst year to be alive’ goes to the year 536 AD. According to one professor, Medieval historian Michael McCormick, working under a Harvard University initiative, it still wasn’t the worst year to be alive. 2020 was one of the worst periods in human history, as far as years in the Gregorian calendar goes. ![]()
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