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A Very Bad Year: 536 AD (Weather Issues & Subsequent Fallout)

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Have just seen a thing on discovery channel about the dark ages and apparantly academia is alight with speculation surrounding a natural disaster which happened around 535-537 and caused / contributed to the dark ages. There is a hint in an anglo saxon document about the sky becoming dark the sun being extinguished, scientists are thinking huge volcano spewing ash cloud. Never heard of it before and cannot find any information, are discovery making it up ?
 
This seems to be the program that you saw - apparently a huge volcanic explosion caused world-wide climatic catastrophes in 535AD. Coincidentally (or not) 535AD was the year that the Roman Empire finally broke up into Western and Eastern halves, profoundly affecting the whole of subsequent European history.
 
The Roman Empire in the West had been declining and falling for many years before 535. The last emperor in the West was Romulus Augustulus who was deposed in 476. The Italian peninsula was briefly reoccupied by the Byzantines in 536 but it was soon reoccupied by the Goths. I doubt this outcome was seriously effected by the catastrophe.
 
I have also heard talk of when King Arthur died around 500, there should have been a swarm of meteors hitting Earth. Causing the Dark Ages. I can't remember any details. I hope we get a spaceguard programme soon.
 
I saw a program on this lasst year sometime, it was based on a book, can't remember author/title. i'll try find out.

Basically, his theory was that at some time around the 6th century AD (give or take 50yrs!) there was a major Volcanic eruption, And i mean MAJOR, somewhere in S.E Asia. Possibly Krakatoa. which lead to massive climactic disruption around the globe. there is apparently, quite a body of evidence for this. There was some written evidence from a Hindu kingdom in the area.

Anyways, this lead to Major famine & drought, and consequently, major movements of people. Hence the Barbarian invasions into Rome. Rome also suffered from Famine & disease at this time, and a major plague swept through the empire.

Interestingly, the Author suggested this was the reason for the failure of the Celtic peoples to defend Britain. As they traded solely with the Latin world at this time, they succumbed to disease and population loss, leaving them vulnerable to the invading Anglo-Saxons, who moved Swiftly into the Political & Demographic Vacuum, (Parallels with the invasion of the Americas?) themselves having little or no contact with Mediterranean Peoples.

He went Further, suggesting this was the cause of the Decline of Classical Highland Central Mexican Civilisation, Teotihuacan Collapsed around the end of the 6th Century, possibly due to incursions from northern Chichimec 'Barbarians' and/or internal unrest.

Basically he seemed to be tying up a whole load of seemingly unrelated events to the Eruption

Sorry its a bit Sketchy, but i'mm writing this from Memory. I'll try dig out more info on it.
 
The writer is David Keys - his book was called (I think) Catastophe! This site gives lots of info about his theory and links about historical happenings around 535AD.
 
Mana said:
I'm glad someone's started this thread. I'd like to know more about seismic and meteorological events that may have contributed to the collapse of megalithic cultures. Disease epidemics may have also played a part - passed on by passing seafarers perhaps.

Several year ago there was a really good series on tv about the effect of geology/topography on the birth , rise and pattern of civilisations in Europe since the stone age . I can't remember what it was or whose theory and no one else I know saw any of it ! Anyone remember it ?
 
I first heard about the big eruption theory in the Ch 4 series 'Secrets Of The Dead'. It took up two programmes and was full of fascinating detail like black rings in timbers used in ancient buildings which proved that the air had been heavily polluted at some point.

I loved that series and catch it on satty now.
 
I definitely think something kicked worldwide civilisation ..and the Celts in the teeth around that time but surely if it was a volcano of such tremendous power then by the 6th century there would have been a pretty good description in some format or another, if somewhere near Krakatoa had "exploded" with so much more force than in the 19th century then surely the evidence for it would be there. The same should go for any other location on land surely, we are talking one big eruption here? Personally I prefer an airstrike, a much bigger version of Tunguska 1908 or a sea strike about 700 mts dia. So all we need is a 10Km crater underwater somewhere.
 
I may be getting my Secerts of the Dead programs mixed up, but wasn't it a volcanic climate related change that wiped out those Icelanders?
 
Has anybody come accross any info about this event Ca. 535/536 AD with respect to the Ice cores from Greenland and Vostock or anywhere else for that matter. Any URL's? Surely dust deposited would be trapped and might give some indication? If there is no indication of Volcanic activities or aerial bombardment then we need another possibility! I believe that Tree rings from this time already indicate a pretty bad time was had by all, but what?
 
Thankyou Rynner, certainly alot to look at. I have only looked at a few so far and they seem to have mixed interpretations of the Ice cores. So far I still side on a large airburst but after reading some of those links maybe airbursts is more appropriate. The cambridge conference link has gone straight in my Favs.
 
the book i mentioned on another thread (by knight and lomas) mentions the meteor shower that may have happened around 535 ad (supposed to be not as severe as the one which caused The Flood) - apparently the people who built the megalithic calendar venus viewing thingies like at skara brae could predict it - which is why the grooved ware people all disappeared from northern europe round about the same time. the book mentions some giant euorpean mummy/remains turning up in central china that dated from just after that time.
 
About the celts:

Wasn't the book of Kells produced suposidly after this event? I can't remember the dates now (even though I studied it at university) but I do remember that there was cultural hapenings of inportance during the dark ages in Ireland. Can anyone elaberate?
 
How We Forget

It's incredible to realize how subjective and forgetful history is. We selectively edit, project fantasy, and conflate facts and factoids almost whimsically. Orwell's Ministry of Truth isn't necessary, given the penchant we seem to have for confabulating.

Working from evidence and deducing tentative theories open to revision and even outright discarding as new evidence arises seems the only way to proceed, but unfortunately neither archaeology nor paleontology are exact sciences. Both remain interpretive. That means subjective and inevitably culture-bound.

Something affected the Celts and the Meso-Americans. Major unexplained changes happened.

We need hard evidence of what or why, and each contender, whether Velikovsky's deductions or an OOPART from Cremo's pants, is just another stagger-step in our drunkard's walk toward some form of "truth", the facts be damned.

As, indeed, Mr. Charles Fort pointed out.
 
ever notice paintings from the dark ages and medeival times? the skies are very dark
 
So far as I recall from that Secrets of the Dead thing (plus another doc. on C4 I can't quite place), the cataclysmic eruption of the 6th century may have been a small 'caldera volcano'. (Not to be confused with the caldera of a volcano.) Apparently when a CV blows, it blows so energetically that no cone can withstand the eruption, and the volcano -between eruptions- is little more than a huge shallow crater, usually riven with hot springs and geysers. Yellowstone National Park in the US is apparently the site of one such CV. The crater is so large that most of the park is within it, IIRC. And also IIRC, a CV was also suggested as the 'smoking gun' for the near extinction of mankind (was it 15K years ago? Or was that the fig. they put as the total human population on Earth at the time immediately post-cataclysm? I forget.) in the past that led to biopaleantologists deducing that everyone on Earth today is ultimately descended from she that they call 'Mitochondrial Eve'.

And apparently, based on the frequency of such explosions in the past, we're overdue a really big CV eruption.
 
synthwerk said:
ever notice paintings from the dark ages and medeival times? the skies are very dark
Paintings from mediaeval times are dark for the several reasons
1) centuries of open fires, candles and laterly oil and gas lighting.

2) Pigment alteration. Sky blue was obtained from plant extracts or sulphates(?)and lightened with white lead. Occaisionally a patron would fork out for a sky done with Azure lightened with white lead.

(Where is a good art conservationist when you need her?)

About 10 years ago I saw the recently restored Birth of Venus (Venus on a half-shell) The sky was glorious spring light, sky blue.
 
Source: Cardiff University

Date: 2004-02-04

Astronomers Unravel A Mystery Of The Dark Ages: Undergraduates' Work Blames Comet For 6th-century 'Nuclear Winter'

Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago – a comet colliding with Earth.


The team has been studying evidence from tree rings, which suggests that the Earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536-540 AD, indicating an effect rather like a nuclear winter.

The scientists in the School of Physics and Astronomy believe this was caused by a comet hitting the earth and exploding in the upper atmosphere. The debris from this giant explosion was such that it enveloped the earth in soot and ash, blocking out the sunlight and causing the very cold weather.

This effect is known as a plume and is similar to that which was seen when comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 hit Jupiter in 1995.

Historical references from this period - known as the Dark Ages – are sparse, but what records there are, tell of crop failures and summer frosts.

The work was carried out by two Cardiff undergraduate students, Emma Rigby and Mel Symonds, as part of their student project work under the supervision of Dr Derek Ward-Thompson.

Their findings are reported in the February issue of Astronomy and Geophysics, the in-house magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The surprising result of the new work is just how small a comet is needed to cause such dramatic effects. The scientists calculate that a comet not much more than half a kilometre across could cause a global nuclear winter effect. This is significantly smaller than was previously thought.

Dr. Ward-Thompson said: "One of the exciting aspects of this work is that we have re-classified the size of comet that represents a global threat. This work shows that even a comet of only half a kilometre in size could have global consequences. Previously nothing less than a kilometre across was counted as a global threat. If such an event happened again today, then once again a large fraction of the earth's population could face starvation."

The comet impact caused crop failures and wide-spread starvation among the sixth century population. The timing coincides with the Justinian Plague, widely believed to be the first appearance of the Black Death in Europe. It is possible that the plague was so rampant and took hold so quickly because the population was already weakened by starvation.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/02/040204000254.htm

Press release:

Astronomers unravel secrets of sixth-century comet

Scientists at Cardiff University believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago - a comet colliding with Earth.

The team in the School of Physics and Astronomy, has been studying evidence from tree rings, which suggests that the earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536 540 AD, indicating an effect rather like a nuclear winter.

They believe this was caused by a comet hitting the earth and exploding in the upper atmosphere. The debris from this giant explosion was such that it enveloped the earth in soot and ash, blocking out the sunlight and causing the very cold weather.

This effect is known as a plume and is similar to that which was seen when comet Shoemaker Levy 9 hit Jupiter in 1995.

Historical references from this period of history - known as the Dark Ages - are sparse, but what records there are, tell of crop failures and summer frosts.

The work was carried out by two Cardiff undergraduate students, Emma Rigby and Mel Symonds, as part of their student project work under the supervision of Dr Derek Ward Thompson.

Their findings are reported in the February issue of Astronomy and Geophysics, the in house magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The surprising result of the new work is just how small a comet is needed to cause such dramatic effects. The scientists calculate that a comet not much more than half a kilometre across could cause a global nuclear winter effect. This is significantly smaller than was previously thought.

Dr Ward Thompson said: "One of the exciting aspects of this work is that we have re classified the size of comet that represents a global threat. This work shows that even a comet of only half a kilometre in size could have global consequences. Previously nothing less than a kilometre across was counted as a global threat. If such an event happened again today, then once again a large fraction of the earth's population could face starvation."

The comet impact caused crop failures and wide spread starvation among the sixth century population. The timing coincides with the Justinian Plague, widely believed to be the first appearance of the Black Death in Europe. It is possible that the plague was so rampant and took hold so quickly because the population was already weakened by starvation.

The work provides an alternative explanation for some of the effects discussed in the 'panspermia' theory, which has been propounded since the 1970s by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the University's Centre for Astrobiology, and the late Sir Fred Hoyle. This theory states that the Earth was seeded in the past, and is still being seeded, with microorganisms from comets, which may have been responsible, not just for the Black Death but other pandemic outbreaks such as the 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu.

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/03-04/040204.html

I once attended an interesting talk from a dendrochronologist from Dublin Univesity (I think) which dealt wih the evidence for such catastrophes in the tree ring record matching historical events.

Emps
 
Annasdottir said:
Coincidentally (or not) 535AD was the year that the Roman Empire finally broke up into Western and Eastern halves, profoundly affecting the whole of subsequent European history.

Not quite right...




What follows is what people with Classics degrees (people like me, incidentally) call a nota analis :) - The Roman Empire split into two separate autonomous entities in 395, by bequest of the last emperor of the Combined Roman World, Theodosius I the Great, divided between his two sons, Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West.

The Empire had originally been split into two halves by Diocletian in 284, but over the fourth century, the two halves remained administrative subdivisions of a single culture. The two halves grew further and further apart culturally, and it was inevitable that the split was going to happen. The West fell quickly - Rome got sacked by the Goths in 410, and after a succession of ineffectual and/or puppet emperors, the last Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus was deposed without a fight.

Most of Italy (including Rome itself) was reconquered in 535 by Count Belisarius and the wonderfully named Narses, Hammer of the Goths in the name of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. It remained part of a unified Byzantine empire until about 721 or thereabouts.
 
Narses the eunuch, what a hero;

but the astronomers have no more reason to believe that it was a comet that caused the tree-ring anomaly and the Justinian plague
than the geologists have for saying it was Krakatoa.

They can't both be right-

show me some iridium!
 
My library angel has been hard at work for the last couple of weeks with all manner of things connected with the year 536AD.
As I mentioned in a previous post I have been re-reading “The Holy Kingdom” by Gilbert, Wilson and Blacket about the real King Arthur and how he was Welsh, (as most of us were in Britain at the time before the conquest). The parts that interested me most were about the 536AD “Yellow Pestilence” and how large numbers of Britains died or emigrated to the continent because of lack of food.
There are many ancient documents to back the claims. It seems that the “Yellow Pestilence” had a tornado-like appearance – something whirling from sky to earth, moving from one end of the country to the other and if it touched you were dead. This in turn reminded me of the pillar of cloud in Exodus. (See below for relevance)

Then there was the book by Dr Mike Baillie who is a dendrochronologist at The Queen's University, Belfast and what he calls absolute confirmation of the above date. It seems that the trees at the time had little growth for about ten to twelve years, according to the rings. ...

Cambridge Conference Network - MORE ON THE AD 540 EVENT
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc061098.html ...
 
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... If there was a metor or impact around 540 CE that caused disruption to the climate, it's nothing to do with Velikovshy's model. Also the was an erution of Vesuvius around the same time (read your link) which could have contributed to climate disruption.
 
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What ever the cause these dates tie in with the effective collapse of what was left of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Dark ages and if Irc there was political turmoil in the far east, babies being sold as food in china and such like, a very interesting period. 8) 8)
 
We've heard about 1816 - the Year Without a Summer:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...the-year-without-a-summer.23731/#post-1802802

A recent historical review has resulted in a claim that 536 AD may well have been the worst year ever in recorded history - especially for Europe, but also worldwide. There was no summer during 1816, but there may have been very little sunshine during 536. The follow-on effects added up to circa 1 century of bad harvests, socio-economic disruptions, and one of the worst known plagues.

536 Was a Garbage Year for Mankind (So Give 2018 a Break)

The fall of the Roman Empire may have been a partial result of the decade of famine and plague that began in A.D. 536, the authors of a new study say.

In A.D. 536, Europe had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.

It started when a mysterious fog swept over the continent, veiling the sun in a blue haze and casting Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness 24 hours a day, for 18 months. Falling temperatures ushered in the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years, crops failed from Ireland to China, and famine ran rampant. Those who endured the long, cold night faced even harsher times in the years to come; in A.D. 541, an outbreak of bubonic plague known as Justinian's Plague scythed through the Mediterranean, killing up to 100 million people.

... Michael McCormick, a medieval historian and archaeologist, recently told Science magazine that the year 536 was "the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year." But despite all that is known about the devastation that began then, scientists still aren't sure exactly what caused the mystery cloud of doom to descend over Europe in the first place. ...

... In a new study published this week (Nov. 14) in the journal Antiquity, the team analyzed an ancient ice core pulled from the Swiss Alps containing more than 2,000 years' worth of microscopic history lessons. ...— and, according to the new study, reveal that a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland directly preceded the beginning of Europe's darkest days. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/64132-worst-year-ever-536.html
 
... A recent historical review has resulted in a claim that 536 AD may well have been the worst year ever in recorded history - especially for Europe, but also worldwide. ...

Update ... Now that we've all seen how bad 2020 turned out to be, it's still nothing close to the crap-fest that was 536 (and following years).

These recent articles add more details and follow-on research results to the work reported back in 2018.
Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the very 'worst year' ever to be alive

You wake up to a dark, dreary, glum-feeling, Monday-type of morning. For the 547th consecutive day.

Just 18 months prior, you were a hard-working farmer gearing up for another bountiful crop season.

But then the skies went dark.

From early 536 to 537, they stayed dark. Across much of eastern Europe and throughout Asia, spring turned into summer and fall gave way to winter without a day of sunshine. Like a blackout curtain over the sun, millions of people across the world's most populated countries squinted through dim conditions, breathing in chokingly thick air and losing nearly every crop they were relying on to harvest.

This isn't the plot of a dystopian TV drama or a fantastical "docufiction" production.

This was a harsh reality for the millions of people that lived through that literally dark time or, as some historians have declared, the very worst year ever to be alive. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.accuweather.com/en/seve...t-the-very-worst-year-to-ever-be-alive/927803

See Also:

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive

Think 2020 was bad? Historians say 536 was worst year ever to be alive
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2021/04/12/worst-year-to-be-alive/8551618222566/
 
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