THIS is considered the worst year in human history – The Times of India
When imagining the worst year to be alive, many might think of the devastation caused by the Black Death in 1349 or the flu pandemic of 1918. But one will be shocked to know that it happened much before that.
According to medieval historian Michael McCormick, the year 536 stands out as the worst period to be alive. This year was associated with the beginning of an 18-month-long darkness caused by a mysterious fog, leading to disastrous events across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. This fog, combined with other natural and human-made disasters, drowned the world into one of the most challenging periods in history.
In 536, a strange fog covered Europe, the Middle East, and northern Asia, cloaking these regions in darkness throughout the day and night for 18 months. Byzantine writer Procopius described it as, “”For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year”. It cooled summer temperatures by 1.5°C to 2.5°C, starting a decade that is now the coolest in the last 2300 years. Snow had fallen in the summer in China, crops withered, and humans went hungry. The Irish historical accounts registered “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.”
The plague of Justinian
The suffering did not stop with the mysterious mist. In 541, bubonic plague hit the Roman city of Pelusium in Egypt. Called the Plague of Justinian, it moved quickly, killing one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire, and worsened the conditions.
How did the fog originate?
For centuries, historians have been surprised by the origin of the mysterious clouds. As reported by Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski of the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono, an Icelandic tragic volcanic eruption sent ash throughout the Northern Hemisphere in early 536. The discovery was based on an ultra-precise analysis of Swiss glacier ice. Two subsequent titanic eruptions occurred in 540 and 547. The repeated tragedies, along with plague, caught Europe into economic stagnation that lasted till 640.
What was the impact on the Roman Empire and medieval economy?
Kyle Harper, a senior admin officer and medieval historian at The University of Oklahoma, noted that the detailed log of natural disasters and human pollution frozen into the ice “gives us a new kind of record for understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire—and the earliest stirrings of this new medieval economy.”
What does the ice record say?
Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. A team led by Michael Sigl of the University of Bern found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. The double blow of eruptions in 535 and 540 explained the prolonged dark and cold.
What does a detailed analysis of the ice cores tell?
Mayewski and his interdisciplinarians opted to search for the same eruptions in an ice core from a 2013 drilling of the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The 72-meter-long core buries over 2000 years of volcanic fallout, Saharan dust storms, and human activity.
With an ultra–high-resolution technique, a laser etched 120-micron shavings of ice that only accounted for a few days or weeks of snowfall. Each of the samples that were about 50,000 from each meter of the core, was tested for roughly a dozen elements, identifying storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution to the month or even finer, 2000 years back, says UM volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov.
Photo Credits: Wikipedia/ Pinterest/ Canva
