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Worst Times In History ~ Part 1
In addition to producing the typical lava flows, a volcanic eruption can also launch melted rock, ash and noxious fumes up to 30,000 feet into the atmosphere – some of which can travel for thousands of miles around the globe. Photo courtesy of pixabay.Com Melondy PhillipsStaff Writer
The world seems to be getting stranger, dar-ker and more difficult these days, leaving many to reminisce about the "good ol' days."
When we talk about the good old days, it's usually a reference to our youth. As the world smacks you in the face with everything it has, it is natural to think "when I was [fill in the blank], times were easier." It refers to a time when our parents, or caregivers, dealt with the major stresses of daily life while protecting their children the best they could, allowing the children to be children and remain innocent to the evils of the outside world.
While the world has experienced many times of good health, provision, comfort and, perhaps, even financial stability, it hasn't always been the "good old days." Many past events were thought to be "the worst in history," especially by those suffering through them. Countries throughout the world have been brought to their knees. Some events lasted only a few months or years while others crushed societies for more than a thousand years, or out of existence altogether. Those who survived these ordeals experienced inevitable changes, from governing bodies, food availability and weather patterns to an everyday quality of life.
This article is a little different since it is mainly a list of some of those events throughout history. Even though this list gives only a few examples of major historical events, it needs to be broken into three parts. Part one will cover worldwide natural disasters and illnesses over the last 2,000 years. Part two will be wars and invasions, while the third part breaks down famines, political issues and economic hardships.
Natural disasters/illnesses
536 AD – The Volcanic Winter: "According to historians, the absolute worst time to have been alive was 536-550 AD, when three different volcanic eruptions blotted out the sun across most of the planet. During the first one, the sky went dark for 18 months. It snowed in the summer. An ash sky lit a cycle of droughts and floods that upended agriculture. Crops failed all over the world, and then starvation began. Societies collapsed. Records from Rome to Japan reference the events. Archaeologists have found a layer of ash virtually everywhere. They've also discovered abnormalities in tree rings around the world during that period."
okdoomer.Io, a volcano in Iceland, Rabaul in Papua, New Guinea, Tierra Blanca Joven in El Salvador, or Krakatoa in Indonesia are all possible culprits ofthe massive eruption which resulted in an ash cloud that kept the northern hemisphere in the dark for 18 months. Temperatures dropped approximately 4-5 degrees colder than average for 18 months. The lack of adequate sun light, resulting colder temperatures, massive crop failures, and starvation also spawned deadly diseases in the coming years.
Procopius wrote that "the sun gave forth its light without brightness…like the sun in eclipse." There are even reports of snow during the summer in China. Reports of the anomaly spread from Europe to the Middle East. It took more than a century for the climate to return to normal.
The exact date of the eruption is in question and might suggest that it wasn't just a single volcano, but multiple eruptions. Tree ring tests indicate possible eruptions in 431, 540 and 547 AD; however, ice samples reveal an event around 534 AD.
541 – 542 – The Plague of Justinian: The plague of Justinian is recorded as one of the deadliest plagues in history. At that time, it decimated about 25 to 60 percent of Europe's population, an estimated 15 to 100 million deaths. The sickness took off across the Roman Empire from Egypt to Europe. In 2013, researchers confirmed that the cause of the plague of Justinian was Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium responsible for the Black Death in 1346. It took more than fifty years for life to begin to normalize after this catastrophic event. Some scholars speculate that this plague was somewhat responsible for the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire.
1346 – The Black Death: The Black Death was the deadliest of three pandemics caused by the Bubonic plague; which results from the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Experts believe the bacterium was most likely transmitted from rodents to humans by the bite of infected fleas. An estimated 75 to 200 million people worldwide died from the Black Death: about 30 to 65 percent of Europe's population. According to cleveland clinic. Org: "Bubonic plague still occurs throughout the world and in the U.S., with cases in Africa, Asia, South America and the western areas of North America. About seven cases of plague happen on average in the U.S. Every year. Half of the U.S. Cases involve people aged 12 to 45 years."
1556 – China Earthquake: An earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.0 to 8.3, struck Shaanxi province in China. It is estimated to have directly killed 100,000 people. An additional population loss of about 730,000 was due to people migrating away and/or dying from famine and plagues of the aftermath. This came to a total loss of 830,000 people in the Imperial records.
1779 – Smallpox in West America: The disease broke out in Mexico and traveled north into Eastern Canada in 1784 – The overall death toll from the North American smallpox epidemic from 1775–1782 is estimated at 130,000, but it is believed that many more Native Americans died than were accounted for. Estimates suggest that up to 95 percent of Indians died from smallpox in one region alone.
1815 – Volcanic Eruptions of Mount Tambora: Mount Tambora had the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The reverberation of which caused worldwide devastation, including the event known as "The Year Without a Summer." Pyroclastic flows caused an estimated 11,000 immediate deaths and more than 100,000 deaths from the resulting food shortages over the following decade. The paper, "Tambora" and the "Year Without a Summer" reads, "For most people living on the peninsula, there was no escape. The three kingdoms Tambora, Sanggar and Pekat on the Sanggar Peninsula vanished. Thousands of people died immediately during the eruption, tens of thousands in the following weeks and months as the ash fall destroyed agricultural production and poisoned the drinking water by changing the acidity and due to its fluoride content. A year later, half of the population on Sumbawa was dead, most of the other half had migrated to the neighboring islands. But, also, on the islands Lombok and Bali, thousands died, and in their desperation many ended in slavery. In total, an estimated 90,000 to 117,000 people died on the main islands of Indonesia due to the Tambora eruption."
1816 – The Year Without a Summer: The eruption of Mount Tambora the year before caused a volcanic winter when it threw an estimated 150 cubic kilometers of ash and rock into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. Global temperatures dropped significantly, making 1816 one of the coldest years of the last 250 years. Monsoon precipitations decreased causing droughts worldwide while other areas received endless rains and flooding. Switzerland was among the most severely affected regions. The darkened, cold and rainy summer led to desperation, severe famine, and cost countless of lives. Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" during that summer in Switzerland.
1883 – Volcanic Eruptions of Krakatoa: One of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in modern history, Krakatoa, exploded with the force of approximately 200 megatons of TNT; which could be heard almost two thousand miles away. This massive volcano continued to produce from May 20 until October 21. The northern two-thirds of the island collapsed beneath the sea, generating a series of lava, pumice, and ash flows as well as immense tsunamis. About thirty-six thousand people were killed. The eruption caused volcanic ash to fall, which damaged crops and livestock, broke down communication, hindered travel and destroyed buildings. And, once again, the average temperature of the entire world fell.
1918 – 1920 – Spanish Flu Pandemic: estimated 50 million people worldwide died
>2000 – AIDS Epidemic: more than 21.8 million deaths
2008 – China earthquake: nearly 100,000 people killed, millions homeless, and an estimated $86 billion in damages
2020 – COVID Pandemic: ranked sixth in Bloom's survey
Currently – Mosquitoes kill nearly 725,000 people each year
Plagues, Famines, And Fires: How The Jet Stream Shaped History And Threatens Our Future
When the bubonic plague reached England in the summer of 1348—spread by fleas, lice, or infected humans, according to the latest theories—it reached a breeding ground for disease. Londoners' immune systems had little defense against the new strains of plague that had been circulating throughout Europe, and London's streets were a cesspit, ringed by overcrowded, poorly ventilated homes. The conditions high in the atmosphere were also conducive for an epidemic. The jet stream, the band of winds that sails above Europe, had shifted dramatically northward, bringing two years of cool, damp summers that sent people indoors, where disease spreads easily. By 1350, the Black Death had killed around a third of England's population, if not more.
The patterns of Earth's high winds have surprisingly widespread effects on life on the ground. A recent study in the journal Nature shows that when the summer jet stream over Europe veers north or south of its usual path, it brings weather extremes that can exacerbate epidemics, ruin crop harvests, and feed wildfires.
"The jet stream has caused these extreme conditions for 700 years in the past without greenhouse gases," said Ellie Broadman, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Arizona. "To me, that's a little scary, to think about the compound effects of simply adding more heat to the atmosphere and imagining how those extremes might get more extreme in the future."
Understanding how the jet stream behaved in the past is crucial for figuring out how it might be changing as the Earth heats up. Scientists believe that these fickle high winds are shifting northward and becoming "wavier," vacillating closer to the poles and then closer to the equator instead of going in a straight line. But it has been hard to draw firm conclusions since real-world measurements of the jet stream only go back 60 years, Broadman said. By that point, greenhouse gas emissions spewed during the Industrial Revolution had already begun to affect its patterns.
For the recent study, however, a team of researchers from the United States, China, and several countries in Europe used data from tree rings to reconstruct the position of the jet stream over the last 700 years. Then they sought to understand how these shifts affected people, comparing the results to records on epidemics, crop yields, and wildfires. According to Broadman, the years that the Black Death raged through England were among the times when the jet stream was the furthest north in the new records, which trace back to the year 1300.
"The big challenge now is to work out how we can really use this new information to test and improve our climate models, and to make more confident predictions about how the jet [stream] might vary in the future," Tim Woollings, a climate science professor at the University of Oxford who wrote a book about the jet stream, said in an email.
The jet stream's whims can lead to what the study calls cascading effects. For example, bad harvests can lead to malnutrition, which can compromise people's immune systems, making epidemics worse. And when people are sick, they can't work as much in the fields, limiting harvests further. The study points to what happened in Russia in 2010, when a "blocking" pattern in the jet stream — which deflects oncoming weather — caused a prolonged heat wave, exacerbating wildfires and leading to the death of an estimated 55,000 people. In the aftermath, the country's wheat production plummeted by 25 percent.
That same kind of stalling pattern might have worsened the devastating floods in Central Europe in September, causing Storm Boris to get stuck and dump rain over the same area for days, leading to some of the heaviest rainfall the region has ever seen. Across countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania, the storm led to at least two dozen deaths and caused billions of euros in damage.
Tracking the jet stream's movement back to Medieval times wasn't a simple process. The researchers knew that when the jet stream shifts north, it leads to cold, wet summers in the British Isles, and hot, dry ones in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. (When the jet stream veers south, those conditions are flipped.) They also knew that the density of the wood cells in tree rings says something about the type of weather the tree endured that year. During hot, dry weather, trees get stressed, and they start adding on smaller and smaller wood cells, leading to a thin, dense band of wood, Broadman said.
So researchers sampled very old trees in different parts of Europe to see whether they could piece together the position of the jet stream based on that data. After showing that the method worked reasonably well for predicting the past 60 years of jet stream behavior, they used tree rings to estimate the jet stream's position going back centuries further.
Then they matched up the data with what they knew about European history, examining historical records about diseases, grain prices, and more. They found that the most extreme positions of the jet stream tended to create their own extremes on the ground. In the Mediterranean, for instance, wildfires occurred mostly during the hot, dry years when the jet stream was further north, and grape harvests (and wine quality) were particularly bad during the cool, wet years when the jet stream veered south.
"The very wonderful, convenient thing about working in Europe is that people have been writing things down for a very long time," Broadman said. "Like, monks in Ireland for centuries and centuries have been writing things down about famine and epidemics."
This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.Org.
The Shifting Jet Stream Has Magnified Wildfires And Plagues. What's Next?
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The shifting jet stream has magnified wildfires and plagues. What's next?
When the bubonic plague reached England in the summer of 1348 — spread by fleas, lice, or infected humans, according to the latest theories — it reached a breeding ground for disease. Londoners' immune systems had little defense against the new strains of plague that had been circulating throughout Europe, and London's streets were a cesspit, ringed by overcrowded, poorly ventilated homes. The conditions high in the atmosphere were also conducive for an epidemic. The jet stream, the band of winds that sails above Europe, had shifted dramatically northward, bringing two years of cool, damp summers that sent people indoors, where disease spreads easily. By 1350, the Black Death had killed around a third of England's population, if not more.
The patterns of Earth's high winds have surprisingly widespread effects on life on the ground. A recent study in the journal Nature shows that when the summer jet stream over Europe veers north or south of its usual path, it brings weather extremes that can exacerbate epidemics, ruin crop harvests, and feed wildfires.
"The jet stream has caused these extreme conditions for 700 years in the past without greenhouse gases," said Ellie Broadman, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Arizona. "To me, that's a little scary, to think about the compound effects of simply adding more heat to the atmosphere and imagining how those extremes might get more extreme in the future."
Understanding how the jet stream behaved in the past is crucial for figuring out how it might be changing as the Earth heats up. Scientists believe that these fickle high winds are shifting northward and becoming "wavier," vacillating closer to the poles and then closer to the equator instead of going in a straight line. But it has been hard to draw firm conclusions since real-world measurements of the jet stream only go back 60 years, Broadman said. By that point, greenhouse gas emissions spewed during the Industrial Revolution had already begun to affect its patterns.
For the recent study, however, a team of researchers from the United States, China, and several countries in Europe used data from tree rings to reconstruct the position of the jet stream over the last 700 years. Then they sought to understand how these shifts affected people, comparing the results to records on epidemics, crop yields, and wildfires. According to Broadman, the years that the Black Death raged through England were among the times when the jet stream was the furthest north in the new records, which trace back to the year 1300.
"The big challenge now is to work out how we can really use this new information to test and improve our climate models, and to make more confident predictions about how the jet [stream] might vary in the future," Tim Woollings, a climate science professor at the University of Oxford who wrote a book about the jet stream, said in an email.
The jet stream's whims can lead to what the study calls cascading effects. For example, bad harvests can lead to malnutrition, which can compromise people's immune systems, making epidemics worse. And when people are sick, they can't work as much in the fields, limiting harvests further. The study points to what happened in Russia in 2010, when a "blocking" pattern in the jet stream — which deflects oncoming weather — caused a prolonged heat wave, exacerbating wildfires and leading to the death of an estimated 55,000 people. In the aftermath, the country's wheat production plummeted by 25 percent.
That same kind of stalling pattern might have worsened the devastating floods in Central Europe in September, causing Storm Boris to get stuck and dump rain over the same area for days, leading to some of the heaviest rainfall the region has ever seen. Across countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania, the storm led to at least two dozen deaths and caused billions of euros in damage.
Tracking the jet stream's movement back to Medieval times wasn't a simple process. The researchers knew that when the jet stream shifts north, it leads to cold, wet summers in the British Isles, and hot, dry ones in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. (When the jet stream veers south, those conditions are flipped.) They also knew that the density of the wood cells in tree rings says something about the type of weather the tree endured that year. During hot, dry weather, trees get stressed, and they start adding on smaller and smaller wood cells, leading to a thin, dense band of wood, Broadman said.
So researchers sampled very old trees in different parts of Europe to see whether they could piece together the position of the jet stream based on that data. After showing that the method worked reasonably well for predicting the past 60 years of jet stream behavior, they used tree rings to estimate the jet stream's position going back centuries further.
Then they matched up the data with what they knew about European history, examining historical records about diseases, grain prices, and more. They found that the most extreme positions of the jet stream tended to create their own extremes on the ground. In the Mediterranean, for instance, wildfires occurred mostly during the hot, dry years when the jet stream was further north, and grape harvests (and wine quality) were particularly bad during the cool, wet years when the jet stream veered south.
"The very wonderful, convenient thing about working in Europe is that people have been writing things down for a very long time," Broadman said. "Like, monks in Ireland for centuries and centuries have been writing things down about famine and epidemics."
This article originally appeared in Grist.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.Org
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