[Rockhounds] Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be
alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped
out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million
people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of
one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says
McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University
Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into
darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light
without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine
historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C,
initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer
in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a
failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague
struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the
Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the
population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse,
McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark
hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the
mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of
ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul
Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in
Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team
reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across
the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed,
in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into
economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a
spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team
reports in Antiquity this week.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive