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Medieval scholars say 536 CE was the worst year to be alive. |
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| That summer, temperatures dropped more than 30 degrees in parts of Europe and Asia (it even snowed in China), so crops failed, leading to widespread famine, starvation, and economic stagnation. Many people who were literate wrote about this at the time — the sun disappeared overnight, after all — but academics didn't take the accounts seriously until the late 20th century. In 1983, a volcanic eruption was theorized to be the source of the darkness, and researchers examining tree rings in Ireland in the 1990s noted a severe temperature drop occurred in the sixth century. In 2018, researchers published a study pointing to a volcano as the likely culprit after analyzing ice cores drilled from glaciers. | |
| Historian Michael McCormick told Science that 536 CE wasn't just the worst year up until then, but "the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive." The climate still hadn't recovered five years later when the first bubonic plague broke out, wiping out up to half the population of the Eastern Roman Empire. Two more eruptions in the 540s certainly didn't help matters, either. The Late Antique Little Ice Age, as the period is known, lasted more than a century, clearing up between 660 CE and 680 CE, depending on the location. | |
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The eruption of Mount Tambora caused a year with no summer. | |||||||||
| When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in April 1815, the resulting sulfur dioxide, ash, and dust blocked the sunlight and lowered global temperatures to the coldest in centuries. The following year, Europe and North America saw unusually chilly and wet conditions during summertime, leading 1816 to be known as the "year without a summer." Even though the volcano erupted more than a year earlier, the volcanic ash was ejected into the upper atmosphere and carried around the planet by the jet stream, continuing to impact weather conditions. | |||||||||
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