It looks as if a South American volcano may have played a major role in worldwide climate and weather problems many centuries ago. The article's over a decade old, but I've just come across it, and I thought other readers might be interested as well.
El Salvador’s Lake Ilopango, near the capital city of San Salvador, is known for boating, diving and the rugged, scenic beauty of its 100 meter-tall cliffs --- the lip of the caldera that holds the lake. However, 1,500 years ago, it may have been the site of one of the most horrific natural disasters in the world. It may also be the long-sought cause of the extreme climate cooling and crop failures of A.D. 535-536, reported Robert A. Dull of the University of Texas at Austin at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in New York this week.
New research on the extent and the timing of the eruption now places the eruption --- previously thought to have occurred three centuries earlier --- at the right time and place. The massive Plinian-type event with pyroclastic flows would have instantly killed up to 100,000 people, displaced up to 400,000 more and filled the skies with ash and dust for more than a year. The new findings would make it the second-largest volcanic eruption in the last 200,000 years. “This event was much bigger than we ever thought,” Dull said.
Such an eruption would explain the episode in Mayan history known as the Classic Period Hiatus, when the Maya stopped building stelae, decorative stone columns erected to mark events, Dull said. It would also finally explain the global cooling of A.D. 535-536, an 18-month period of cloudy skies, crop failures and famines that was described in both Roman and Chinese historical accounts.
There's more at the link.
Later research appears to have "backdated" the eruption to about 431 AD, meaning it would not have caused the climate events of 535-536 AD: but it would still have done a colossal amount of damage for many hundreds of miles around the explosion. It may have caused the abandonment of several city-states, and damaged the overall Mesoamerican civilizations so severely that it may have been a factor in their collapse several centuries later.
Mother Nature can make humans look pretty puny, can't she?
Peter
6 comments:
Look up South Carolina’s “year without a summer.” 1842 IIRC, following the eruption when Krakatoa blew itself off the map in the pacific, and it snowed in SC in the summer.
I am very close by this lake, which is in Central America, not South America.
Once again 'settled' science gets changed. What a surprise!
I immediately looked up to see if this date corresponded to the fall of the Mochi, of which the most famous is the Lord of Sipan. While that particular tomb predates it, the collapse and its resulting massive human sacrifice was centuries later, after which the Inca took over.
Yeah, my favorite example of "All the experts agree..." is plate tectonics. "Oops, we may have been wrong about that...".
Rewatching the Carl Sagan series Cosmos. Throughout the episodes he constantly hammers home that science is different from religion because the basis of science is to constantly question what may be the accepted norm. He says brave people are not afraid to come up against the establishment. That's true science he states.
It's interesting that the liberal term has grown up to be called "Settled Science" even though we fly spacecraft on interplanetary missions over a period of years with pinpoint accuracy, still call it the special THEORY of relativity. True science is not seen on CNN and thier ilk, it's quietly done in the background by hard working people.
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