Paleoclimate Data Sheds Whole New Light On History Of Rise & Fall Of Dynasties Across Planet

[hatrack]

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What stunned Manning, an Egyptologist, was that the paper recalibrated earlier chronologies by seven to eight years, so that dates of the eruptions neatly coincided with the timing of well-documented political, social, and military upheavals over three centuries of ancient Egyptian history. The paper also correlated volcanic eruptions with major 6th century A.D. pandemics, famines, and socioeconomic turmoil in Europe, Asia, and Central America. The inescapable conclusion, the paper argued, was that volcanic soot — which cools the earth by shielding its surface from sunlight, adversely affecting growing seasons and causing crop failures — helped drive those crises.

Since then, other scholarly papers relying on paleoclimatic data— most of it drawing on state-of-the-art technologies originally designed to understand climate change — have found innumerable instances when shifts in climate helped trigger social and political tumult and, often, collapses. The latest is a paper⁠ published last month⁠ in Communications Earth and Environment that posited “a systematic association between volcanic eruptions and dynastic collapse across two millennia of Chinese history.” The study found that 62 of 68 dynastic collapses⁠ occurred soon after Northern Hemisphere volcanic eruptions, an outcome that had only a one-in-2,000 chance of happening if the eruptions and collapses were unrelated. Chinese have traditionally cited the withdrawal of the “mandate of heaven” to explain the cold weather, droughts, floods, and agricultural failures that seemed to accompany the fall of dynasties. The paper contends that those phenomena have a climatic explanation. All these papers are propelled by a nearly-decade-long revolution in climate science technology. A blizzard of quantitative data from “climate proxies” — ice cores, tree rings, cave stalagmites and stalactites, and lake, bog, and seabed sediments — has upended the way some historians do their work.

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The movement among historians to take climate into account is still a subgroup within a subgroup, a branch of environmental history usually led by academics who win tenure before taking on “Big History” in volumes that can span millennia or epochs. As a graduate student in the late 1970s, John L. Brooke, now an Ohio State University historian, says he was discouraged from addressing climate and didn’t take up the subject until he had written two books on American history; he eventually wrote Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, the field’s magnum opus to date, published in 2014. (Brooke is now writing a revised edition, but the onslaught of new paleoclimatic data is so overwhelming that in the last two years he has managed to redo only two of the book’s 13 chapters.) The emerging data suggests that many historians have overemphasized the roles of leading political actors — monarchs, politicians, military leaders — and overlooked climate’s impact on human events. Wars, revolutions, and assassinations may end regimes; changes in climate have played starring, if not sole, roles in ending whole societies.

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Less than a decade ago, scientific calculations of the dates of volcanic eruptions used only 16 measurements per ice core to cover 2,000 years of history and included as much as two-century margins of error, too imprecise to be of use to historians. Instruments invented at the Desert Research Center in Reno now take 21,000 measurements per ice core and can detect at least 30 elements down to parts per quadrillion⁠. This data improves on the old estimates by two orders of magnitude, enabling historians to make exact correlations with documented historical events. Each climate proxy offers different perspectives⁠. Ice cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers usually offer a global view, measuring particles that drifted thousands of miles from volcanic eruptions, wildfires, or other occurrences. Thus, since lead was a byproduct of mining and smelting that produced silver coins during the Roman empire, lead sediment in faraway ice cores can offer insight into Roman economic activity.

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https://e360.yale.edu/features/climate-clues-from-the-past-prompt-new-look-at-history

[mopinko]

1. interesting.

[Wicked Blue]

2. This is fascinating

I hate to think what could happen in the changing climate we live in now.

[leighbythesea2]

3. So interesting

And telling for the future.

[NickB79]

4. Good thing civilization has advanced beyond that

No way we could ever be brought down by climate change like all those other, more primative civilizations