If someone asked you about the worst year in human history, what do you think? The year (1347 AD) was so bad that the Black Death hit Europe badly. Plus, the year 1918 marked the start of an influenza pandemic that killed around 100 million people, and even the Corona pandemic isn’t that bad compared to them.
In a report published by the US website “sciencealert”, writer Michael Starr said people may never have thought about the worst year, which is the year (536 AD). As Harvard archaeologist and medieval historian Michael McCormick said in Science magazine in 2018, “This year has been the start of one of the worst times in life.” Read also A Palestinian artist transforms a cactus into a muzzle. What’s her message? A muzzle, sterilizer and face shield. A List of Requirements to Return to American Schools Tired of wearing a mask. How and when to get rid of it Bankruptcy in the pink city … The circumstances of the crown force the Bedouins of Petra to return to the caves of their ancestors
Mysterious fog
It was (AD 536) the tenth year of the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, as not much was happening on a human level except for the regular boring skirmishes. There have been no generalized epidemics or genocide of an unusual magnitude.
However, something strange was happening in the sky. A dark and mysterious haze obscured the sun, lowering temperatures and triggering years of chaos around the world. Drought has spread, crops have been destroyed, summer snow has fallen in China and famine has spread.
For his part, the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that “this year has been very terrible, since the sun was shining like the moon, all this year, and it looked a lot like an eclipse phenomenon”.
Catastrophic volcanic eruptions
There was evidence that catastrophic volcanic eruptions were the cause, not only in Antarctic ice cores and Greenland tree rings, but also in the emergence of the effects of subsequent volcanic phenomena , which in turn caused global temperatures to drop and the onset of a devastating famine.
And in 2018, a detailed glacial analysis of the Col Gnefity glacier on the border between Switzerland and Italy provided new insight into the terrible fog that engulfed the world.
In fact, the ice core is a wonderful archaeological source, as permanent ice deposits build up gradually, through snowfall every year, which means that ice deposits can be found for a year. given and see what was going on in the atmosphere.
In the year (536 AD), volcanic ash and debris called tephra mixed with the ice sheet, indicating the presence of a large volcanic phenomenon.
In the same context, samples of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica have shown evidence of a second volcanic eruption in the year 540 AD, which caused the emergence of a “cloud” of prolonged misery. Then, in 541, the plague of Justinian appeared, and everything went from bad to worse.
Lead pollution
Around AD 640, researchers noticed a mark on the ice represented by lead, and the lead pollution was not at all good, as it appeared when humans started mining and melt the money. Then there was another increase in lead levels in ice in the years (660 and 695) AD, as humans made silver coins.
“High-resolution ice analysis provides a new independent time series for renewable silver production in the early Western Middle Ages,” the researchers wrote in the article. Overall, the economy was recovering and it only took a hundred years.
Interestingly, ice cores also showed a decrease in the degree of lead contamination of ice during the period between 1349 and 1353. This coincides exactly with the timeline of the Black Death, as researchers used as a marker to determine the validity of their estimate of volcanic signs and increased pollution.