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Climatic Events & Atmospheric Pollution Affecting the Roman Empire

ramonmercado

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New 'Little Ice Age' coincides with fall of Eastern Roman Empire and growth of Arab Empire
February 8, 2016 in Earth / Earth Sciences

Summer temperatures were reconstructed from tree rings in the Russian Altai (red) and the European Alps (blue). Horizontal bars, shadings and stars refer to major plague outbreaks, rising and falling empires, large-scale human migrations, and political turmoil. Credit: Past Global Changes International Project Office
Researchers from the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project write in the journal Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unprecedented, long-lasting cooling in the northern hemisphere 1500 years ago. The drop in temperature immediately followed three large volcanic eruptions in quick succession in the years 536, 540 and 547 AD (also known as the Common Era CE). Volcanoes can cause climate cooling by ejecting large volumes of small particles - sulfate aerosols - that enter the atmosphere blocking sunlight.

Within five years of the onset of the "Late Antique Little Ice Age", as the researchers have dubbed it, the Justinian plague pandemic swept through the Mediterranean between 541 and 543 AD, striking Constantinople and killing millions of people in the following centuries. The authors suggest these events may have contributed to the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.

Lead author, dendroclimatologist Ulf Büntgen from the Swiss Federal Research Institute said, "This was the most dramatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2000 years."

A later "Little Ice Age" between 14th and 19th centuries has been well documented and linked to political upheavals and plague pandemics in Europe, but the new study is the first to provide a comprehensive climate analysis across both Central Asia and Europe during this earlier period.

"With so many variables, we must remain cautious about environmental cause and political effect, but it is striking how closely this climate change aligns with major upheavals across several regions," added Büntgen. ...

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-ice-age-coincides-fall-eastern.html


125-year mini ice age linked to the plague and fall of empires
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...paign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2016-GLOBAL-twitter
 
Pollution caused by Roman Empire is preserved in ice.

Rise and fall of Roman Empire exposed in Greenland ice samples
By Katie LanginMay. 14, 2018 , 3:00 PM

Modern people aren’t the only ones who’ve polluted the atmosphere. Two thousand years ago, the Romans smelted precious ores in clay furnaces, extracting silver and belching lead into the sky. Some of that lead settled on Greenland’s ice cap and mixed in with ever-accumulating layers of ice. Now, scientists studying annual deposits of those ice layers have found that spikes and dips in lead pollution during the Roman era mirror the timing of many historical events, including wars fought by Julius Caesar.

The level of detail is “astounding,” says Dennis Kehoe, a scholar of Roman economic history and law at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who wasn’t involved in the work. What really impressed him was how closely the lead pollution numbers tracked what ancient historians know about the expansion and collapse of the Roman economy—a system built on silver coinage known as denarius. “It’s really the rise and fall of a monetary system based on silver,” he says. “Prices were reckoned in silver, so they had to have silver.” ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ly_2018-05-14&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2033053
 
Roman Republic laid low by Alaskan Mega-Eruption.

For ages, the shadow of a volcano has hung over the fall of the Roman Republic.

Ancient historians told of the Sun’s mysterious disappearance after Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 B.C.E., which was followed by bouts of cold and crop failures. Now, a team of scientists and historians has discovered that one of the largest known eruptions in history struck in 43 B.C.E.—potentially contributing to 2 years of weird weather and famine as the republic dissolved and the empire took shape.

The darkened sky after Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March was likely caused by a known, small eruption at Mount Etna. But early the next year, in January or February, Alaska’s Okmok volcano in the Aleutian Islands blew its stack, forming a giant, 10-kilometer-wide crater rim. The volcano’s northern location meant that sunlight-blocking particles could rise into the low-lying Arctic stratosphere, where they would spread easily throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the researchers report in a new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/alaskan-mega-eruption-may-have-helped-end-roman-republic
 
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